In an increasing global economy, we focus on foreigners buying American soil. But we forget, Americans have been investing and buying property overseas for the last century. Some of the buying, is merely flowing back this way.
BEIJING (AP) — The Chinese bureaucrats who spent taxpayers' money on a $700-a-night Las Vegas hotel and visits to Hawaiian beaches and a San Francisco sex show might have gotten away with it if someone hadn't lost a bag on the Shanghai subway.
The dozens of documents and receipts in the bag, with officials' names and enthusiastic comments attached, were swiftly posted on the Internet, spreading like wildfire across Chinese cyberspace over the past week. That brought swift punishment for some officials involved — and another disgusted shrug from Chinese citizens all-too-familiar with corruption.
Officials gambling and spending government money on shopping sprees and sightseeing during overseas trips is hardly new. But making the lurid details public certainly is, illustrating the growing power of the Chinese public to use the Internet to expose wrongdoing.
"These are public resources, and people have the right to know how they were used," Wang Xixin, a law professor at Peking University, told The Associated Press Friday.
The bag was thought to have been left on the subway by a travel agent, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. The man who posted them online described himself as an IT engineer — and an angry one.
The documents chronicle the adventures of 23 officials from the eastern city of Wenzhou during five days of a three-week trip that cost taxpayers $94,000, Xinhua reported. Their Communist Party committee has demanded repayment of all unapproved expenses.
Xinhua said the group visited nearly a dozen cities, many more than authorized, and spent just five days on official business — far fewer than ordered.
The reasons for the trip? Everything from "An Overview of American History" to "Honest and Clean Government Management."