Latest claims about Red Cross to be investigated

China Daily, July 1, 2011

Beijing police have started an investigation into the case of Guo Meimei, a 20-year-old woman who has recently hit the headlines for boasting online about her luxurious lifestyle and claiming she works for the Red Cross Society of China.

Guo Meimei

China National Radio reported that Beijing police had required Guo to come to Beijing to face questioning.

Zi Xiangdong, spokesman for Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, confirmed the investigation on Thursday but refused to give more details.

Guo's case has greatly tarnished the image of the Red Cross Society of China, with tens of thousands of people questioning whether Guo had financed her lifestyle with donated money. Some netizens even said they would never donate to the Red Cross again.

Claiming that Guo has nothing to do with the society and that her claims had damaged the society's reputation, the Red Cross reported the case to the police last Friday and said it would take legal action to "safeguard our rights and restore the society's clean reputation".

In the latest response to Guo's case, Wang Rupeng, secretary-general of the Red Cross Society of China, said the society had suffered because this case had become a way for the public to express its hatred of the rich.

"The antipathy toward Guo and distrust toward the Red Cross in this case show that the general public tend to hate corruption and the rich, which is understandable," Wang said. "But it is unfair to the Red Cross, as we have had nothing to do with this woman."

The scandal erupted when Guo started to talk about her extravagant life on her micro blog and claimed to be the general manager of a company called Red Cross Commerce.

She uploaded a lot of her personal pictures, as well as photographs of Maserati and Lamborghini cars, expensive purses and a palatial villa.

She has since become the hottest topic on the country's major micro-blog website, weibo.com, and the number of her "fans" shot up from several hundred to more than 321,000 by Thursday afternoon.

A lot of netizens have since expressed their anger, arguing that the Red Cross Society of China had squandered and misused donations.

Faced with great public pressure to explain the case, the society reiterated that there was no such company as Red Cross Commerce under its control and it did not have an employee named Guo Meimei.

However, experts say the anger caused by this case is a result of long-held distrust of the society's allocation of funds and its opaque operations.

In a recent scandal about the misuse of donations, the society was found to have overspent 4.2 million yuan ($649,800), exceeding by 34 percent the accepted budget, on equipment procurement in December 2009, according to a report released by the National Audit Office on the implementation of the government's budget.

"Reforms are needed to bring the Red Cross Society of China back on track with higher moral standards and more transparency in its allocation of funds," said Yu Jianrong, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.