Surprise ending for Chinese employees skipping work to watch Avengers: Endgame
- A team at a heating company were in for a shock when Communist Party officials turned up at their office for a snap inspection, setting off a chain reaction around the city.
.jpg?itok=H5_PTCSf&v=1700020945)
It could have been a scene from a Chinese version of the box office hit Avengers: Endgame.
When Communist Party discipline officials turned up at the customer service centre of a state heating firm in northern China late last month, it was as if half of all life had disintegrated – just two employees were left at Heihe Thermoelectric Group’s centre in Heihe, Heilongjiang province.
But there was no supervillain to blame – the rest of the staff, including director Zhang Dexin, had skipped work for a few hours to see the superhero movie, the highest-grossing foreign film in China.
The city’s commission for discipline inspection said on its official WeChat account on Tuesday that the inspectors conducted the surprise check in response to a tip-off on April 26.
What happened next set off a chain reaction around the city.
“The entire staff of Heihe Thermoelectric Group’s customer service centre skipped work to watch a film, creating a bad influence,” the commission said.
“It shows there is a lack of daily supervision within the company, and not enough ideological and political education of party members.”
Avengers: Endgame becomes highest-grossing foreign film of all-time in China, crosses 4 billion yuan
Zhang was given a warning and transferred to another job and the company’s managing director, Han Dong, was told to make a self-criticism at a board meeting, the statement said.
Since the announcement, other state bodies in the city, such as the Heihe Environmental Protection Bureau, have held study sessions to enforce party discipline.
The bureau said that at one session on April 30, the heating firm’s example was discussed along with an anticorruption report by the local government’s disciplinary group on “four examples of formalism and bureaucracy”.
Bureau staff also watched an episode from Keeping a Lifelong Watch, a documentary series put out by authorities in Ningxia Hui autonomous region this year, exploring how discipline in the daily lives of both ordinary and famous people, both past and present, has contributed to success.
Chinese police get top credit for Avengers: Endgame cinema stake-out
Both the Heihe procuratorate and political consultative committee said on WeChat this week that they had organised meetings to discuss the bad example set by the Heihe heating company and were determined to tighten discipline and prevent any issues in the future.
Maoyan Entertainment, China’s largest movie ticketing app, said that by Saturday Avengers: Endgame had earned 4.03 billion yuan (US$519 million) in China since its release on April 24.
