Opinion | Shaming of splurging official reported in party mouthpiece

The director of the Binjiang Industrial Park in Taizhou, Jiangsu, was treating visiting officials to a banquet dinner in the industrial park’s reception building on Friday night when a mob of villagers stormed the building.

Within hours, photos of the hapless Zhang kowtowing three times on the dining table and pleading with the enraged crowd through a white loudhailer spread on microblogs.

"“Please let me go,” he was quoted as saying in earlier reports. “I was born in the countryside too! I admit my mistakes!”

The People’s Daily seemed to endorse the villagers’ action when it published a story on Tuesday headlined “How it is possible to evade the eight rules”, referring to austerity guidelines set out by party general secretary Xi Jinping at a Politburo meeting on December 4.

Later that month, Xinhua released the menu – “four dishes and a soup” – for a lunch Xi had during an inspection tour in Hebei. The phrase quickly turned into a catchphrase for the austerity campaign.