The tale of the girl called 'Pretty Pretty Baby'

She calls the white Maserati she drives the "little horse", and her orange Lamborghini the "little bull".
Guo Meimei, 20 - who goes by the name "Guo Meimei Baby" - may be just another young woman flaunting her wealth through photographs posted on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, but her link to the Red Cross of China has sparked a national debate around how donations to charities are used.
The Red Cross of China is one of the country's largest charities and has strong ties to the communist government. And evidence of Ms Guo's extravagant lifestyle has made the Chinese suspicious in a country where the divide between rich and poor is growing and corruption is rife.

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Guo Meimei Baby ... accused of taking money that was meant for charity. Photo: AFP

In her microblog, Ms Guo, whose name "Mei" means "pretty", has posted photos of herself with the sports cars, a pile of luxury Hermes handbags, sipping drinks in business class on a flight and showing off her luxury villa.
She identified herself as "commercial general manager" at the Red Cross, a position verified by Sina - the company that runs Weibo.
Suspicious Chinese netizens are asking how a young woman such as Ms Guo came into such wealth. Did she or her boyfriend embezzle money from the Red Cross to line their own pockets?

In business class ... Guo Meimei Baby. Photo: AFP

Their suspicions were fuelled by a photo that surfaced on the internet in April, which revealed the Shanghai branch of the Red Cross spent 9859 yuan ($1420) on a meal.
China's state auditor also announced in recent weeks that it found five discrepancies in its review of the Red Cross's 2010 budget, prompting a denial of corrupt practices from the organisation, which has often been in the forefront of official fund-raising drives following natural disasters.
Ms Guo later backtracked on her Red Cross job title as China's online activists swung into action and dug up information about her past and her relationships.

One of her cars ... Guo Meimei Baby. Photo: AFP

But the damage had been done and rumours about Ms Guo and the Red Cross continued to grow.
When she tried to leave the country - purportedly to Australia - to get away from the spotlight, the Australian embassy in Beijing was inundated with calls and emails from people expressing fears that she was going to run away with "their donation money", the Shanghai Daily reported.
The netizens had alleged Ms Guo was the girlfriend or mistress of a senior official, 42-year-old Wang Jun, who organised charity campaigns for the Red Cross.

Living the high life ... Guo Meimei Baby poses on a horse. Photo: AFP

On Weibo alone, more than 600,000 posts a day were written about Ms Guo, London's Daily Telegraph reported. It claims more than 140 million users.
Mr Wang was forced to resign from his job as a result of the furore, while the Red Cross vehemently denied any links to Ms Guo.
Ms Guo played down her links with the mega-charity in a special report into the controversy on national broadcaster CCTV.
"The wording 'Red Cross Society' is too sensitive," Malaysia's The Star newspaper reported her as saying.
"Everybody was saying that I used the organisation to make big bucks."
The English-language China Daily - another state-run paper - weighed in on the debate.
"The RCSC [Red Cross Society of China], as a non-profit charity organisation, has the obligation to keep all its activities transparent and let the public know how it manages its donations and where it has spent them.
"Yet, its lack of transparency in the use of charity donations has long been a matter of concern to the public."
The People's Daily - the mouthpiece of China's Communist Party - also acknowledged the growing influence of social networking tools on Chinese society and politics in an article titled: How microblogging power shakes reality in China.
"Microblogging was introduced in China in 2009 and has quickly developed into a major channel of public opinions within less than three years. Many hot incidents were first exposed through microblog posts.
"From the forum to microblogging, the people's enthusiasm and ability to participate in public affairs has greatly risen along with the [i]nternet, which is developing at an unbelievable speed."
English-language social media sites Facebook and Twitter - which attract millions of users worldwide and through which aspects of the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa were organised - are banned in China.
Yet local sites Tencent (China's largest internet service portal), Weibo, Baidu (a search engine) and Renren (sometimes dubbed the Chinese Facebook) have grown in popularity in recent years, and are among the world's most visited online networking sites.
The ultimate victim of the widespread outrage may be China's philanthropy drive.
Last year, Chinese citizens donated 70 billion yuan ($10 billion) to charities compared with 54 billion yuan in 2009, Agence France-Presse reported, quoted the official Xinhua news agency.
The country is still new to philanthropy and the China Development Brief, a prominent publication, said local charities' "lack of transparency and mechanisms to track donations" remained major stumbling blocks, AFP said.
The China Daily said as a result of the uproar over Ms Guo, 90 per cent of people who took part in an online poll the newspaper conducted indicated they would not donate to the Red Cross of China any more.
The Financial Times noted: "There is also a deeper problem in the lack of trust in a society whose wealthiest members often get rich through government connections.
"The idea that people would, out of the goodness of their hearts, give money away is scoffed at."
- with AFP


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