NEW DELHI: Today is the Mid Autumn Festival in China and the country's top corruption buster has a fight on its hands with a crackdown against, of all things, mooncakes.Mooncakes are round pastries filled usually with red bean or lotus seed paste - sometimes also with yolks from duck eggs - and surrounded by a crust. They're usually eaten and gifted during the moon-watching Mid Autumn Festival. It is customary in China for businessmen and families to present them to their clients or relatives as presents, and that has helped fuel a demand for 'high-end mooncake styles'.A professor at the Communist Party of China 's (CPC) 'school' says the crackdown is a "major political task" and calls for intensified supervision against undesirable work styles such as formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance, urging stern penalties for transgressors, the Chinese government run news outlet Global Times reports.The mooncake "...has created opportunities for many officials to receive bribes," Zhang Xixian, a professor at the CPC school said. That's why Beijing has created a website allowing the public to report mooncake-related abuses during the festival.As part of China's nationwide anti-corruption campaign, official gift-giving is banned, and mooncakes, often seen as a hidden form of bribery, have been targeted since 2013, which has resulted in their sales plunging.Still, this year, abuses have already been reported.Yesterday, tech behemoth Alibaba fired four employees for mooncake fraud, because they wrote a program to take advantage of a discount on mooncakes that the company was offering. They ordered as many as 124 mooncake boxes, the state-run People's Daily reports.Alibaba said they were fired because their behaviour "touched the bottom line of integrity", and caused "unfairness in welfare distribution among employees" Asiaone says.Still, if this crackdown seems excessive, it might be worth noting that in 2012, a box of two mooncakes made of pure gold sold for 42,900 Yuan, which is around $6,400, Global Times reports.

Source: Times of India September 15, 2016 08:03 UTC