Just Saying | A toast to Xi Jinping’s crackdown on China’s ingrained drinking culture

Donald Trump apparently once jeopardised a business deal with a group of Hong Kong billionaires by declining to indulge in a drinking contest with them.

According to the unwritten ordinances of contemporary punditry, this preamble should lead – like all Trump-related preambles – into some veiled, or unveiled, disparagement of his lack of deportment, his racism and, most crucially, his hair.

Not today, though. Even a stopped clock tells the right time every 12 hours and I’m with Trump on his teetotalism. The man is mad, bad and dangerous enough without getting on the El Dorado. But look: as arguments for abstinence go, the prodigious drinking that attends a large part of both state and commercial activity in these latitudes is hard to beat.

Therein also lies the reason why President Xi Jinping (習近平) ought to be given some credit for his campaign against the mainland’s drinking classes. Last month brought a win in his efforts to curb what might properly be described as Russian levels of boozing in public life as cadres in Anhui (安徽) province were told that, with the exception of events involving foreign affairs, or held to attract investment, there would be no more drinking at official dinners – otherwise known as “the office”.

Chinese drinkers consume more alcohol than the Brits and Australians, says study

The ban, designed to combat an ingrained culture of “working at the drinking table” according to Xinhua, came in the wake of an investigation into several deaths in the province among functionaries who had been too assiduous in their gan bei toasts and succumbed to alcohol poisoning. It also followed Xi’s move, shortly after assuming office in 2012, to place restrictions on alcohol at military functions. The practice of lower-ranking officers in the People’s Liberation Army endlessly toasting their superiors was held to be causing widespread liver disease and elevated blood pressure, not to mention chronic badger breath, among the officer class.