Official asked abbot to lend orphans

A district civil affairs bureau director in Jieyang, Guangdong Province, has been sacked after an online video showed a local official asking to borrow orphans from a Buddhist monastery so he could dupe government inspectors into thinking his district was operating an orphanage that never existed.

The announcement was made by the Rongcheng district government on Monday. The district civil affairs office director was also suspended.

In a videotaped conversation said to be recorded on January 10, Huang Jianwei, who called himself a civil affairs official, told the abbot of a Buddhist monetary that the Rongcheng district civil affairs bureau, Jieyang, needed to borrow a dozen orphans because a higher level government believed the district had been operating an orphanage for more than 15 years.

"Do the government a favor," Huang told the abbot, "the orphanage in Rongcheng does not actually exist. We need some of these orphaned kids to show to higher level officials."

Shi, the monastery's abbot where 54 orphans are being cared for, turned Huang's request down.

The civil affairs bureau of Rongcheng district denied previously that it asked to borrow orphans and claimed that "Huang is not an official employee of the bureau," reported the Xinhua News Agency.

The district had received funding to build an orphanage but it never opened, according to the Xinhua. But Huang Chenhui, director of the district civil affairs bureau, said on Sunday that the district government has been planning to open an orphanage since 1995 but it never had the funding for operation.

The Xinhua report on Monday did not say if the sacked director was Chen.

"The orphanage building is now occupied by various departments of the local government," Xia Chuhui, a local freelance journalist, who was shooting a story about the monastery's orphanage when he videotaped the conversation between the abbot and the official, told the Global Times.

Xinhua backed Xia's claim by saying the orphanage building is used by the civil affairs bureau's marriage and funeral registration offices and as dormitories for government employees.

"I found it shocking that the local civil affairs bureau not only failed to provide shelter for the orphaned children but also tried to cover up the fact by taking advantage of the monastery, which was actually doing the government's job of caring for orphans," Xia said.

The news was reposted hundreds of thousand times on the Internet and added to the heated discussion on China's welfare system that was triggered by a fire in an unregistered orphanage in Lankao, Henan Province, that took the lives of seven people on January 4.

Some Web users suggested the district government may have been receiving funds from the city for years to operate a nonexistent orphanage. They also wondered how the local government could have deceived the city government for so many years.

"What the Rongcheng civil affairs bureau has done is highly irresponsible and wrong," an official surnamed Lin from Guangdong civil affairs department told the Global Times, adding that the government is trying to work out a way to prevent such things from happening in the future.