Two village officials in central China have been expelled from the Communist Party and put on one year’s probation, respectively, after they embezzled or misused tens of thousands of yuan in government funding that was supposed to go toward new toilets, a provincial discipline watchdog said Wednesday.

In 2014, Xie Baiqing and Xie Wenbing — the report did not say whether they were related — misappropriated 87,000 yuan (then $14,000) after over-reporting the number of toilets that needed replacing in Laoxiejia Village, in Hunan province’s Jiahe County.

The county government had agreed to allocate 500 yuan for each new toilet, so the Xies — two of the village’s highest-ranking officials — claimed they needed to replace 285 toilets. However, only 111 latrines were renovated, leaving the Xies with over twice as much funding as they needed — some of which went toward another village nearby that had asked for help in applying for its own toilet funds, and 10,000 yuan of which went directly into the Xies’ pockets.

Hunan’s discipline inspection commission discovered the cadres’ caper in June 2018 and recovered the embezzled 10,000 yuan. The officials’ actions “seriously damaged the relationship between cadres and the public, and affected the images of both the party and the government,” according to the notice.

With a well-earned reputation for grim conditions, China’s squat toilets have been targeted for large-scale renovations since 2015, when President Xi Jinping explicitly called for a “toilet revolution,” especially in rural areas and tourist sites. (Image: VCG)