£7 million, 200ft bronze puffer fish statue erected in China
A 200ft puffer fish crafted from more than £7 million of bronze and steel has emerged as the most bizarre challenge so far to China's nascent campaign against government waste.
Xi Jinping, China's president, has vowed to ruthlessly stamp out extravagance and corruption since taking over the Communist Party last November.
But officials in the eastern city of Yangzhong, known for its puffer fish, appear to have breached President Xi's new anti-waste guidelines in spectacular fashion, splashing out some seventy million yuan on the 2,100 ton puffer fish statue, which is as tall as a 15-floor building.
On Friday, the Chinese press questioned the wisdom of commissioning a multi-million pound homage to a poisonous fish at a time of government belt-tightening.
The Modern Express, a local newspaper, said it failed to grasp how such a large sum could have been spent on the gigantic vertebrate which officials are calling a "scenic pagoda".
Lu Jianxin, project manager for the toxic Tetraodontidae, told the newspaper "the most eye-catching thing about this pagoda is the design."
Chinese micro-bloggers begged to differ, suggesting that the price tag was the most interesting aspect of the unusual project.
"How is it that Chinese local governments are so rich that they can build all these weird monuments?", one Weibo user asked.
"They can build whatever they want, how ever many [times] they want. Why not build some hospitals, schools and gyms?"
Another wrote: "Is there anything more stupid than this [puffer fish]? The answer is yes. There will be even worse in the future."
Garish and bizarre buildings and statues have become a trademark of today's China as cash-flush officials seek monuments to inflate their images and egos.
The city of Huainan in Anhui province boasts an exhibition centre designed to resemble a grand piano and a violin while the new and distinctly phallic headquarters of the People's Daily has also been widely mocked.
Yangzhong's puffer fish is unlikely to go down well in Beijing's corridors of power.
Recent months have seen President Xi ban new government buildings,moon-cakes paid for with public money and even overlyextravagant pot plants.
Earlier this month, state media announced that Beijing would cut back on the "parterres" placed in Tiananmen Square to commemorate the forthcoming bank holiday on October 1.
China's news agency, Xinhua, said the crackdown would help "boost ties between officials and the public and exorcise undesirable work styles such as formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance."
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