'Rich baby' sparks anger with her lavish lifestyle

0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Shanghai Daily, September 26, 2011
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The daughter of a local government official in southwest China is at the center of an Internet storm after she boasted of her lavish lifestyle on her microblog.

You Yixi holds two designer bags believed to be worth at least 100,000 yuan.

You Yixi holds two designer bags believed to be worth at least 100,000 yuan.[Photo:mop.com]

In one photograph, You Yixi, the 21-year-old daughter of You Chenghua, vice director of Jinping County in the less developed Guizhou Province, holds two designer bags believed to be worth at least 100,000 yuan (US$15,639).

In the photo, taken at an airport lounge, she is wearing a stylish top and shorts and large sunglasses to pose with a classic orange Hermes handbag on her right arm and a large Louis Vuitton travel bag in her left hand. She is also holding an airline ticket.

Other pictures on her sina.com microblog showed expensive accessories, and she also wrote about her wealthy lifestyle.

In one entry she wrote: "We prepared a 17,000 yuan birthday gift for my uncle and 6,000 yuan of the bill will be on me." Another said: "Look at the wardrobes of new clothes. There are so many of them that I just forget to wear them even once."

The articles and photographs had been deleted by yesterday but not before they had been widely circulated, attracting many comments questioning how the woman, a student at a university in Guiyang, Guizhou's capital, was able to afford such luxury items.

Several posts demanded that her father explain how he was able to support his daughter's extravagances.

An official report showed that in 2010, the average resident in Jinping County earned 2,109 yuan. About 92 percent of the county's 200,000 population is involved in farming.

Online, there were claims that You was just the latest in a long line of what people are calling China's growing group of "daddy-entrapping rich babies," meaning children of government officials or celebrities who cause their fathers to become the subject of scandal rumors because of their lavish spending on luxury goods.

You tried to answer her critics yesterday by updating her microblog to accuse them of "libel" and saying she did not know what she had done wrong.

By yesterday, the Jinping County government had not responded to questions about the controversy.

"Ironically, some government officials' children and lovers who couldn't help showing off wealth online may appear to be an effective power to help uncovering corruption details," an anonymous blogger commented on the woman's microblog.

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