Civil servants around China are resorting to all sorts of tricks to disguise foreign holidays as "study trips," according to a December 25 report of the Guangdong-based The Time Weekly. Some even manage to live it up in Las Vegas at the taxpayers' expense. What's more, travel agencies are colluding with corrupt officials to arrange the trips.

Overseas "study trips" are just official junkets

Tax reforms over the past few years mean the government is no longer strapped for cash and greedy officials have devised elaborate schemes to get their hands on it. One favorite ploy is to set up a fraudulent "overseas study tour" to disguise an all-expenses paid overseas holiday taking in trips to well-known resorts and, more often than not, casinos.

Official travel is hugely profitable for travel agencies and there is fierce competition to get a slice of the pie. While the average private citizen spends around 10,000 yuan (US$1,460) arranging a foreign trip, the average bill for an official is 30,000 yuan (US$4,383).

Agencies pad the bills by adding spurious "security" costs to ensure the absolute safety of officials on their overseas junkets. And of course officials must travel in comfort and style, so luxury always comes before economy when booking flight tickets and hotels.

An easier way to steal a march on the competition for a travel agency is to give kickbacks to the "study groups". One blogger discovered by accident that "study groups" from Wenzhou and Xinyu had accepted tens of thousands in kickbacks from travel agencies.

Forged official invitations are another trick up the junketeers' sleeves. For example, the up-market Silicon Valley town of Milpitas in California was ones of the destinations the Wenzhou delegation traveled to, but the Milpitas Mayor's Office said it had no record of any invitation. A source said it was common practice to bribe overseas officials in some countries. But in European and North American countries, non-government intermediate agencies would help with the operation, the going price for an official-looking invitation being 1000-3000 US dollars.

Of course when the "study group" arrives at its destination, the delighted junketeers contrive to spend as little time as possible on tedious "investigations" so as to make more time for relaxing and sightseeing. Las Vegas is a favorite destination because they can indulge their passion for gambling and because of its no-questions-asked anonymity.

More artful dodges

Colleagues of a Shanghai civil servant who had been on unpaid leave were astonished when they saw a fax asking her for a work report on her recent overseas study trip. Her "sabbatical leave" had been spent on a trip arranged by another department – all paid for out of the public purse.

Some minor officials like to pass themselves off as VIPs – and receive corresponding treatment – by forging business cards with fancy job titles. One official even forged an official identity for his wife who, on arrival in America, disappeared from the group to spend the holiday with her son who had settled there. The other members of the study group saw her again only on the plane back home.

No trip? Take the cash instead

Twenty-seven year old Mr. Fei recalls that at the end of his second year as a Shanghai civil servant, he was given a fat red envelope containing 10,000 yuan as "compensation" for not having had an overseas trip that year. Fei said that afterwards he went abroad many times but was self-disciplined and always stuck to the official itineraries.

Senior officials in Shanghai are not so interested in overseas trips because they have so many opportunities. And young officials like Fei do not want to risk their long term careers for the sake of a two-week trip. It is the middle-level officials in their 50s and lower level staff who are most likely to take advantage of the overseas study scam. Coming to the end of their careers and with no prospects of promotion, they don't see why they shouldn't get a little piece of the action.

The Deputy Director of the Wenzhou Municipal Supervision Bureau, Han Jianyan, revealed that Wenzhou's overseas study program costs about 100 million yuan (US$14 million) a year. A CCTV documentary recently estimated that in China as a whole, 900 billion yuan (US$130 billion) of public money is spent on banquets, official cars, and overseas study every year.

(China.org.cn by Fan Junmei, December 29, 2008)