【正文】 icial account on Weibo, China?s Twitterlike service, the organization?s post requesting donations solicited pages and pages of scornful disastrous fundraising campaign is the latest embarrassment in a longfestering public relations crisis for the in 1904 as a privately run organization, the RCSC was recognized by the international Red Cross federation in 1952, but since then has e under ever tighter government control — and with that has e growing distance from the , so close are the government ties that since 1996, RCSC employees have been technically regarded as civil against the RCSC has been festering for years, amid public anger over the organization?s lack of transparency and rumors that the government officials who run the organization have had their hands in the deep is the suspicion of Chinese officialdom in general that Hong Kong?s legislature last week refused to vote an almost $13 million donation to the Sichuan authorities for relief in Lushan for fear the money would be RCSC received more than $700 million after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, but questions about how that money was used have came to a head in 2011, when a young woman who claimed to be a business manager at the RCSC began posting pictures to her Weibo account that documented her lavish lifestyle and luxury Meimei?s wardrobe included dozens of Hermes bags and other highend pieces, which she displayed proudly while sitting behind the wheel of a Maserati or Lamborghini, or perched in firstclass seats on netizens demanded to know how a midlevel employee at an NGO could possibly afford this type of the RCSC pleaded innocence and denied that Guo was even an employee, its reputation was left in Chinese writer Bei Cun spoke for many when he wrote on his Weibo account, “I assert: the Red Cross Society of China cannot be changed, its credibility is bankrupt and it cannot change its ways.” He also drew attention to the fact that the RCSC is not operated by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, “just like Chinese PEN has nothing to do with PEN International, and the Chinese Catholic Church has nothing to do with the Vatican.” Staff at other charity organizations plain bitterly that the RCSC gives the whole sector a bad name.“I don?t trust the Red Cross Society of China — for one thing, they are far too inefficient,” Yuan, a volunteer raising funds for victims of the Lushan earthquake, tells theearthquake, the 38yearold entrepreneur from Chengdu, in Sichuan province, has been gathering donations and ferrying funds to the disaster zone quickly, a process he says his small group can handle more efficiently than the bureaucratic RCSC.“From the time we receive the donations to the time we pass the funds over to the victims, it takes us only five hours,” says Yuan, who declined to give his first name because of the sensitive nature of the issue.“Can the Red Cross do that? Of course they can?t.”Indeed, according to the RCSC?s own figures, as of April 24, four days after the earthquake, it had distributed only 25% of the donations it public backlash has been disastrous for the RCSC, but other charity organizations too are having to work hard to build credibility with a public that is eager to help but skeptical about how funds are being money on the streets of Chengdu, Yuan says he faces intensescrutiny from those he approaches for donations.“Some