A Patient Gave a Hospital Worker a 1.9-Yuan Soda, Then Reported It as a Bribe
A screenshot of a Foshan health bureau's reply about a 1.9-yuan soda has become one of China's most argued-over documents of the week: the patient who gifted the soda also reported it as a bribe, kept complaining for two years, and received an official answer that satisfies almost no one.
The gift was a single can of honey-flavoured Jianlibao, priced at 1.9 yuan — about 25 US cents. The complaint, filed through China's 12345 government hotline, alleged that a pharmacy worker at a Foshan hospital had accepted it in breach of the rules barring medical staff from taking gifts. What has made the case a fixture of the week's trending lists is the bureau's written reply, now circulating as a screenshot: measured, procedural, and more quotable than any one-liner on the topic.
The Chancheng district health bureau did investigate, and its findings are specific. The worker, it concluded, had not solicited the soda; the patient, a long-term regular at the hospital, offered it as a gesture of thanks, and the worker accepted out of courtesy (盛情难却). The hospital responded by criticising the worker "severely" and repeating its integrity training for all staff — but, the bureau noted, a hospital has no power to force an employee to return a gift once accepted. The full reply circulated via Sina News.
Two details turned a footnote into a saga. The first, per Baidu's trending board, is that the incident itself dates to 2023 — the viral reply describes something two years old. The second is in the trending phrase itself: the patient has, by the account Chinese media carried, kept up complaints against the same worker for two consecutive years. A dispute over a can of soda has therefore been running, through repeated filings to a hotline built for genuine grievances, far longer than the soda was in anyone's fridge.
The argument underneath has split, roughly, between process and proportion. One post called it a "fishing-style complaint" (钓鱼式投诉) — a grievance manufactured to catch the system out. A longer commentary weighed both ends: two years of repeated filings consume real administrative resources and crowd out genuine cases, yet the red line for medical staff recognises no price threshold, so accepting even a soda was a lapse the hospital had to answer for. Gifts and complaints alike, several posters concluded, need boundaries.
The system being tested here is the 12345 hotline — a municipal complaint channel any resident can call — and the integrity rules Chinese public hospitals have operated under since successive anti-corruption campaigns, under which staff may accept nothing of value from patients, full stop. A can of soda falls under that rule; so does a mooncake. This site has written before about what happens when a complaint over a gift escalates: the collision between a zero-tolerance rule and ordinary social courtesy is built into the system, and patients know how to use it.
The bureau's answer, in the end, declined to call the soda a bribe: no solicitation, no discipline beyond criticism and more training. Both sides got something — the worker a formal mark on the record, the complainer a public ruling that stops short of the word she wanted. The complaints, by every account, have continued.