China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development have openly denounced authorities in two poverty-stricken counties for spending hundreds of millions of yuan on “image projects.”
The ministry said on its official website on Jan. 18 that a “gate construction project” in Yuzhong County, Gansu Province, and a “landscape improvement project” in Hancheng City, Shaanxi Province, had misplaced priorities in spending such huge sums. The Yuzhong government in particular borrowed money in order to construct two antique-style gates mimicking the aesthetic during the Qin and Han dynasties.
