NOTHING gave an imperial Chinese mandarin as much face as the number of porters carrying his sedan chair.

For the modern official, “face” comes from riding around town in a large, black, chauffeur-driven foreign-brand car with tinted windows.

The yearning for status symbols is defying government campaigns to instil communist-style frugality.

The cost of buying official cars in 2004 totalled £3.5 billion and spending is rising at more than 20 per cent a year.

Annual expenditure on officials’ cars — including fuel and the essential driver — is now a staggering £21 billion a year, more than the £20 billion that China allocates for military spending.

Repeated government campaigns to wean officials off their rolling status symbols have achieved scant success, the state-run China Daily said at the weekend.

The problem, said the newspaper, is that “those who are making the reform policies are themselves beneficiaries of the old system”.

The beneficiaries clog the streets of Beijing, where one in four cars on the congested roads is an official vehicle.

Vehicles of choice among senior officials are the Audi 100 and the Buick — both made in China. The short beeps of a siren from a sleek black car forcing its way to the front of a jam can be heard from dawn to dusk.

Along Changan Avenue, which slices east to west through the heart of Beijing and beneath the portrait of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square, the black cars seem to outnumber the vehicles of ordinary mortals.

In keeping with the view of the car as status symbol, small-engine vehicles have been banned from Changan Avenue for seven years. However, that ban ends on April 1. A campaign two years ago to sell off public cars and give senior officials a travel allowance instead appears to have gained little traction.

In the late 1990s the official media listed licence plate numbers to shame officials into giving up their perks.

One enterprising garage in the southwestern city of Chengdu offered to install push-button devices that would revolve the licence plate and conceal the identity of the car.

But transport as status symbol has a long history in China.

During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), officials of the top seven levels out of nine could use a sedan chair with four porters, princes could be carried by eight and the emperor and his mother were entitled to twenty-four.

No military officials — no matter how senior — were allowed a sedan chair.

Since reforms in 1994, ministers are allowed no more than 3-litre engines for cars costing a maximum of £32,000, while officials below the vice-minister grade are not entitled to a car — except to receive distinguished guests.

That makes it hard to explain how in one hard-up county in central Hunan province, where the Government could afford to pay teachers only 70 per cent of their salary, the county spent £357,000 on 36 cars for officials. Further fuelling public anger is that many officials use their cars privately, to go out for dinner at expensive restaurants or take their children to school.

One commentator on an online chatroom wrote: “It’s essential to reform the official car system.

“The Government must not only improve the living standards for the masses but must improve its own image.”

Change could still be a long way off, after several crackdowns that have not made headway.

The China Daily said: “It will be an uphill battle and take a long time to reform the way the public cars are used by government officials.”

Measuring The Expense

£11.4 bn is earmarked for preparing Beijing for the the 2008 Olympics

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