World record bids wanton waste of taxpayers’ money

ON MAY 1, Xi’an, capital of Northwest China’s Shaanxi province, organized 1,374 drones to fly together in order to break a Guinness world record, but the event did not go as planned. Gmw.cn comments:

Some say the performance was successful because all the drones did fly. But it was intended that the drones form the characters for Xi’an in the sky. However, it became a chaos. When the performance came to an end, some drones lost control and fell to the ground.

The drone performance company said there was signal interrupting them during the performance, but that statement has not been supported by the investigation yet. Whatever the reason, there are certain questions that the organizers of the activity must answer.

First, the activity was organized by the municipal city wall management commission, a government department. All the money was taken out of taxpayers’ pockets. Is it really worthwhile to spend taxpayers’ money to break a Guinness world record?

Second, more detailed information shows they spent 10.5 million yuan ($1.65 million) on the activity, almost 7,900 yuan to hire one drone. It should be noted that one quite good drone costs about 6,000 yuan in the market. Is the price too high? Is the bidding process legal?

For long, many local governments have been spending money to break records recognized by the Guinness World Records, while some local officials even boast such plans as “achievements”. Such “achievements” render little help to the local economy, nor do they help improve the livelihoods of local residents.

Therefore, it is time to conduct a thorough investigation into the accident in Xi’an. The budget should be reviewed, the bidding process should be checked, and the cause of the accident must be found out. More important, measures must be taken to prevent local officials from wasting taxpayers’ money on such meaningless “record-breaking” activities.