Hold the shark's fin soup. Cancel the elaborate pre-Chinese New Year parties.

Those are some of the new directives from Beijing now being relayed to government officials across China.

"We used to get together for a big banquet before the New Year holidays," a local official told me last week. "No more. Even in obligatory official banquets, we are also banned from serving dishes like sharks fin, bird's nest and all that stuff."

And who is telling you that, I inquired.

"The Number One," he replied, nodding his head.

In the past four decades that I've lived and worked in China, dining has always been a big part of my social and professional activities. In China, like anywhere, one of the best ways to know people and conduct business is to share a meal.

I have enjoyed sharing luscious -- and not necessarily expensive -- meals with Chinese friends and associates. I particularly love dumplings, Peking duck and spicy Sichuanese food.

I have also eaten and drunk my way through many of the government's traditional 12-course banquets, which sometimes left me dyspeptic and dizzy.

In that sense, at least, it's good news that Beijing is slashing the bureaucrat's entertainment budget and scaling back on ostentatious banquet binges.

It's about time.

But not all in China are pleased.

Many restaurants, shops, spas and recreation centers that have largely banked on government-sponsored spending sprees -- especially during holidays -- are hurting badly.

"Our business is down this year," Tony Chang, a Beijing restauranteur, told me. "Many of our usual customers from government agencies have canceled their Chinese New Year banquets. We're down by nearly half."

Wang Lisheng, an employee at a "recreation village" in suburban Beijing, recalled receiving over 30 groups of customers from state-owned enterprises in January last year. As of last month they have only had a few individual customers.

"What has been affected is not just the food business," wrote the Southern Weekly newspaper in a commentary entitled "The Disappearing Evening Banquet." "The banquet has created a complete chain, and all the other related industries will be affected if the banquet shrinks."

But some do not think the changes will be lasting.

"This is what officials usually do after they take up office," wrote a micro-blogger on Weibo, China's micro-blogging site. "The society will relapse in three years, and then those officials will be even more greedy and corrupt to compensate for what they lost. Famished wolves will never become vegetarians."

This, analysts say, may be just a "new guard, new policy" scenario. "Xin guan shang ren san ba huo," a new broom sweeps clean, so says the the Chinese saying.

Since Xi Jinping, 59, took over as the paramount leader of China in November, he has rolled out a raft of decrees aimed at changing the leaders' "working style."

"Compared with their predecessors, the new leaders seem to show more sophistication, confidence and ambition," said Wenfang Tang, a political science professor at the University of Iowa. "They want to give unscripted speeches and hold shorter meetings. They call for the realization of 'the Chinese dream' or China's renaissance."