Government officials spend more than US$25 billion a year on food and drink and over US$37 billion a year on overseas travel according to a state media reports cited by the Financial Times. Zhu Lijia of the China National School of Administration said his calculations pointed to an ?unhealthy tendency of publicly funded overseas travel", and called for measures to make officials less profligate. However, the People's Daily Online seen as the party's key Internet media outlet disputed Zhu's figures. It said that food and drink expenditure was US$2.1 billion in 2004 while overseas travel accounted for just US$362 million in 1999, a massive differentiation from Zhu's figure for the same year. "Ruthless demands for diligence and thriftiness have won great progress in standardizing and perfecting government cost controls," it quoted a finance ministry official as saying.
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