Today's words of wisdom: don't steal from China.This story appeared in today's NY Times. Liu Zhihua, Beijing's former vice mayor and director of the city's agency that supervised the Olympic-related construction projects, faces execution for skimming about $1 million. Through an assortment of bribes and down-right, hand-in-the-cookie-jar theft, Liu took enough money to pay for a whole lot of nice vacations that he and his mistress enjoyed.
Corruption was fairly widespread while I was in Beijing. This was most apparent when it came to the food at Olympic venues. The organizing committee had alloted about $5 per person, per meal for venue organizers to spend on its volunteers. That amount, in China, is a fortune - some of the best meals I had there (in nice restaurants) didn't even cost that much.
So, did we eat like kings while working?
Nope.
The food was, for the most part, inedible and indistinguishable. We were served plastic trays of food, which has been microwaved in order for the flavors of the plastic to mix with the the flavors of the gray, unidentifiable chunks of meat and veggies to create the perfect blend of gag-inducing crap. The only thing that was consistently digestible on a daily basis was the block of white rice they served up - and even that tasted like I'd rolled up a newspaper and started chewing on the end of it.
Someone, somewhere along the chain of command, was skimming a ton of money off the top from the food budget. I'm guessing he (or she) was funding several mistresses at several chateaus and I can only hope that he'll be caught. Then again, I think the death penalty is too strong a punishment for embezzlement. Maybe they should just make him eat the food.
He'd probably die anyway.
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