Chinese authorities have launched a crackdown on “sky high” mooncake prices ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Mooncakes, a small customary baked dessert, are traditionally given to family and friends to celebrate one of the most important holidays in the Lunar New Year.
International online shopping guides have collated the best places to find the most luxurious boxes of mooncakes to impress friends and relatives for the celebration of the fall harvest. Some individual cakes cost more than the equivalent of US$20 or have luxury branding.
Photo: AFP
However, under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), such opulent gifts are heavily regulated.
In the lead up to the festival, authorities have targeted sellers who are overcharging or offering “excessive packaging” that exceeds strict limits on production costs and banned ingredients. As part of the campaign, sellers are also required to keep mooncake sales records for two years.
Law enforcement officers have inspected 180,000 sellers and suppliers since early last month, the state administration for market regulation said.
Authorities said that the average box of mooncakes costs about 70 yuan (US$10) to produce and should not exceed a retail price of 500 yuan, Chinese-language media reported.
About 80 percent of products were sold for less than half that, but some sellers were flouting the regulations by pricing their cakes at 499 yuan or combining them with increasingly extravagant gift packages, local media reported.
Some have bundled them with other products such as nuts or liquor, mislabeled them as “pastry gift sets,” or sold them as part of high-end packages at hotels.
“The cake is still the same cake, but the box is expanding year by year,” one local media report said.
The mooncake giftbox market is reportedly worth about 16.9 billion yuan in China, and producers have become increasingly inventive to stand out from the rest.
Clarissa Wei (瀏覽者), a Taipei-based journalist and author of an upcoming Taiwanese cookbook, said that the giving of mooncakes en masse began in the middle of the 20th century in Hong Kong and spread to mainland China.
They were now a “status symbol” with an element of competitiveness, she said.
“Over the years, the packaging has become more and more elaborate and is, in many ways, just as important — if not more — than the pastries themselves,” Wei said. “There’s also a lot of hype around the packaging; many brands will spend up to a year designing their mid-autumn mooncake boxes.”
China’s mooncake crackdown — which also occurred at least twice before in 2013 and 2014 — is a sign of the Chinese Communist Party’s push to curb societal excesses.
Other campaigns or laws have discouraged expensive wedding celebrations and “vulgar” practices that reflect “rampant money worship,” limited the number of dishes a table can buy at a restaurant and introduced fines for the promotion of performative overeating.
“These [high-priced mooncakes] not only deviate from the origin of traditional culture, but also contribute to extravagance and waste, and have a negative impact on the social atmosphere, and may even be alienated into a carrier of corruption,” one official told China News Weekly.
In China, some sellers have suggested the apparent return of expensive mooncake sales in defiance of the ban is linked to China’s economic woes.
One Nanjing retailer, selling standard mooncakes and fancy packaged ones, told reporters that business was much worse than in previous years.
The rivalry between Asia’s two biggest countries has extended into outer space. After India’s landing of its Chandrayaan-3 rover on the moon last month — becoming the first country to put a spacecraft near the lunar south pole and breaking China’s record for the southernmost lunar landing — a top Chinese scientist has said claims about the accomplishment are overstated. Ouyang Ziyuan (歐陽自遠), lauded as the father of China’s lunar exploration program, told the Chinese-language Science Times newspaper that the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, at 69 degrees south latitude, was nowhere close to the pole, defined as between 88.5 and 90 degrees. On Earth,
A cat wearing a black and yellow security vest strolls nonchalantly past security guards lined outside a Philippine office building waiting to receive instructions for their shift. Conan, a six-month-old stray, joined the security team of the Worldwide Corporate Center in the capital, Manila, several months ago. He is one of the lucky moggies unofficially adopted by security guards across the city, where thousands of cats live on the street. While the cats lack the security skills of dogs — and have a tendency to sleep on the job — their cuteness and company have endeared them to bored security guards working 12-hour
NEW ENERGY: Mark Lambert, the next deputy assistant secretary for China and Taiwan, is to head China House, which has been criticized for slowing policymaking Washington on Friday named veteran diplomat Mark Lambert as its top China policy official at the US Department of State at a time when ties between the two strategic rivals remain fraught over issues including Taiwan, trade and US curbs on Beijing’s access to US technology. Lambert is to be deputy assistant secretary for China and Taiwan, and is to head the Office of China Coordination, informally known as China House, the State Department said in a release. The division was created late last year to unify and better coordinate China policies across regions and issues, but has faced criticism for adding
TEMPORARY HITCH? Biden said the US ‘cannot ... allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,’ and he expects House Speaker McCarthy to come up with a solution The threat of a federal government shutdown suddenly lifted late on Saturday as US President Joe Biden signed a temporary funding bill to keep agencies open with little time to spare after the US Congress rushed to approve the bipartisan deal. The package dropped aid to Ukraine, a White House priority opposed by a growing number of Republican lawmakers, but increased federal disaster assistance by US$16 billion, meeting Biden’s full request. The bill would fund the US government until Nov. 17. After chaotic days of turmoil in the US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy abruptly abandoned demands for steep spending cuts