Mooncakes have long doubled as a vehicle for gift-giving between business associates and officials in Chinese society, and by the early twenty-first century a market had developed in extremely elaborate and expensive mooncake gift boxes, sometimes packaged with gold, jewellery or other valuables hidden inside or alongside the pastries, that functioned in practice as a socially acceptable way to pass expensive gifts, including to officials, without it looking like a direct bribe.
The Chinese government's anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping explicitly targeted this practice starting in 2013, issuing directives restricting the use of public funds to purchase luxury mooncakes and warning officials against accepting extravagant mooncake gifts, a crackdown credited with visibly cooling the luxury mooncake market within a few years and pushing mooncake gifting back toward its more modest traditional role as a shared family food rather than a disguised form of high-value gift exchange, a clear example of a centuries-old festival food becoming entangled in, and then reshaped by, entirely contemporary political concerns.
In South Korea, the related autumn festival Chuseok centres less on the moon-gazing and mooncakes described in this entry's first article and more on charye, a rite of ancestral offering performed at home, and on visits to family gravesites; it is one of the two biggest travel occasions of the Korean year alongside the Lunar New Year, prompting a nationwide multi-day public holiday and some of the heaviest domestic travel congestion of the year as workers return to ancestral hometowns.