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Mooncake austerity hits China’s Mid-Autumn festival

First baijiu, then red carpets, and now mooncakes. For Chinese government officials, the list of taboos keeps getting longer.

One month before the country celebrates its annual Mid-Autumn Festival, Chinese authorities said on Wednesday that they are barring officials from buying mooncakes – a centrepiece of the holiday – as well as giving presents or hosting dinners on the public dime.

Traditionally, mooncakes are gifted (and often re-gifted) as a form of tribute during the festival, exchanged among family members as well as among companies, their clients and employees. "But this kind of polite reciprocity, when overdone, becomes a kind of squandering of cash," ran an editorial in the People’s Daily on Thursday, praising the mooncake crackdown.