Whose head will be the next to roll in Beijing’s anti-corruption campaign? Sinologists all over the world are reading the teacup dregs on that one right now, but I prefer to read the price tags on mooncakes at the local supermarket. And I can report that the new age of austerity has led to a fairly steep devaluation of the renmin-mooncake.
Mooncakes are the fruitcake of the Orient: more of a gesture than a pastry. The luxury variety – popular for gifting by bureaucrats, mandarins and crony capitalists – come in gift boxes that are worth several times the value of the concoction of suet and duck egg yolk inside. Recent years have seen a veritable arms race in mooncake packaging, with millions of renminbi wasted each year on cakes that no one ever gets around to eating (though the secondary market in mooncake regifting is quite active). But now outré is out and austerity is all. The days of the jewel-encrusted mooncake may be numbered.
The official People’s Daily reported on the front page of its Monday edition that the mooncake market had returned to its senses this year, the result of a government ban on using public funds to buy the traditional pastries which mark the celebration of the lunar “mid-autumn festival” later this month. “Unhealthy trends” – such as using government money to buy jewels to decorate the mooncake, presumably – have been stamped out, like Bo Xilai’s political career.