MCLC: airport tantrum

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: airport tantrum
***********************************************************

Source: The Guardian (2/25/13):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/25/airport-tantrum-arrogance-entit
lement-china

Airport tantrum becomes latest symbol of arrogance and entitlement in
China
Provincial mining boss suspended after surveillance video of him
wrecking equipment appears on the internet
By Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing

============================================
Link to video: Chinese passenger loses temper at airport after missing
flight 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/feb/25/chinese-passenger-airpor
t-flight-video>
============================================

Anyone could understand Yan Linkun's frustration when he was informed that
he had missed his flight. But the way Yan reacted to the news – banging on
doors and smashing computers – has turned him into the latest symbol of
the entitlement and arrogance increasingly associated with China's
political elite.

A surveillance video showing the mining company deputy chairman's violent
tantrum at Kunming Changshui airport, Yunnan province, went viral on
Chinese microblogs after it was uploaded to the internet this weekend.
The four-minute video, captured last Tuesday morning, shows Yan standing
by a check-in counter as an airport employee informs him that he has
missed his flight to Shenzhen.

Yan – who is also a member of a political advisory body in Qujing, Yunnan
– responds first with incredulity, then rage. He destroys two computers
and a telephone before dismantling a free-standing poster and using its
metal frame to banged on the flight gate door. A crowd gathers, but nobody
attempts to restrain him. The mining company has suspended Yan, and the
political advisory body has threatened punishment.

Since the incoming Chinese president, Xi Jinping, launched a crackdown on
corruption last autumn, dozens of officials have been exposed as crooked
by the country's internet users and subsequently reprimanded. The
crackdown has done more to expose the scale of China's corruption problem
than validate the high-level efforts to tackle it.

Yan has expressed remorse for his behaviour. "My irrational actions and
rudeness have caused some losses to the airport as well as bad effects to
the public, so I sincerely apologise to the airport and public," he told
the airport's deputy manager, according to the Shanghai Daily
<http://www.whatsonningbo.com/news-13239-yunnan-mining-company-official-yan
-linkun-suspended-over-airport-rage.html>.

The tantrum is not the only incidence of high-level misbehaviour that has
gripped China during the past week. The Communist party secretary of a
district bureau in Nanyang City, Henan province, drove a government car
into a cinema on Sunday morning, injuring 26 people,according the state
news agency Xinhua. Eight of the injured were hospitalised, two of whom
remain in a critical condition.

The official, Liu Xianchong mistook the accelerator in his
government-issued vehicle for the brake, reported Xinhua. The report cited
local police as saying that Lie had been off work for seven months because
of a cerebral infarction, a type of stroke. A special group to "handle the
incident and its aftermath" was set up by the local party committee,
Xinhua said. Liu has been detained.

Last week party disciplinary authorities said a former official in Shaanxi
province had been expelled from the party for "serious wrongdoing" and
"suspected crimes". Yang Dacai rose to notoriety last August after he was
photographed smiling at the scene of a road accident in which 36 people
died. He became a symbol of official corruption when furtherphotographs
appeared on the internet of him wearing a number of luxury watches
<http://www.qinfeng.gov.cn/info/1556/79966.htm> that many in China believe
he could not possibly afford on a public servant's salary.