It was a sprawling cultural and tourism project that completely went off the rails, and now Beijing is using it as evidence of grass-roots government mismanagement – one of three high-profile examples of wastefulness newly flagged by China’s disciplinary authorities.
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Following an investigation, the project – dubbed “Yaohan Longevity City” and located in Gongcheng Yao autonomous county of Guilin – was condemned as a “severe waste of resources”.
Initially hailed in 2018 as a key initiative in the county’s 30th-anniversary celebration, the undertaking intended to position Gongcheng as a leading hub for health tourism. Now it serves as a warning to other local-level government cadres across China.
Spanning an area of about 9.3 hectares (23 acres), the project was initially expected to attract a total investment of 1.65 billion yuan (about US$229 million). However, due to a broken capital chain and a series of poor decisions by local authorities, only 540 million yuan was spent, with six out of the eleven planned buildings left abandoned and idle.
Authorities in the county, with a population of nearly 250,000 people, “made blind decisions to build cultural and tourism projects out of touch with reality, resulting in idleness and waste”, China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said in its report, released this week.
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Deng Xiaoqiang, the primary backer of the project, who was found guilty of misappropriating 5 million yuan (US$700,000) under the guise of loans to a company he controlled, was expelled from the Communist Party in December 2022.
In addition to the doomed “longevity city”, other examples of government mismanagement have come under the scrutiny of China’s de facto anti-corruption and political disciplinary agency. As part of a broad effort to address inefficiencies and corruption at local levels, central authorities have highlighted problematic practices.