Tightened supervision on holiday gift-giving has cleared the way for a more relaxed holiday as officials re-focus on family.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on Monday this year, is a traditional Chinese holiday during which families reunite under the full moon and eat mooncakes. The festival, like many others, is also an excuse for subtle bribery.

"It is the most relaxed Mid-Autumn Festival in my five-year career, I am going home early for a family reunion," said Zhang Lei, a 30-year-old civil servant in Hefei, in east China's Anhui Province.

Last year, the country's disciplinary departments were urged to tighten supervision and enforcement of rules to reduce corruption. Practices such as the use of public funds to buy gifts, hold banquets and pay for holidays, as well as extravagance and waste, have been strictly banned.

It is the first time Zhang and colleagues have no reception, no official banquet and no pressures for holiday-gift giving during the three-day break.

"Young staff of the community office personally made mooncakes and presented them to 70 elderly people in the community," said Zhang. After visiting the elderly residents, he returned home for a family reunion.

The family-oriented holiday is celebrated by sharing mooncakes, small,dense pies that contain a variety of fillings. In the past, ornate mooncakes costing upwards of 10,000 yuan were exchanged as lavish gifts to carry favor or impress superiors.

The practice is not just limited to government officials, say Wang Wenxin, a high school teacher in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province.

"Even though we don't serve in the government, our campus is also influenced by such gift-giving," he says.

He says the gift-giving climate surrounding the official holiday has detached the festival's meaning from its roots, making it more about exchanging high-priced gifts than about spending time with family.

"I even felt unease at family banquets in the past if I had not prepared any gifts for my leaders," he said.

With less emphasis on expensive gifts and more affordable mooncakes, he says there is no longer such pressure.

In addition to lowered prices, China's crackdown on corruption also led to simpler packaging.

During an August crackdown on breaches of conduct by officials, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) of the Communist Party of China (CPC) routinely uncovered officials using public funds to buy mooncake as gifts.

The disciplinary watchdog of the Communist Party of China (CPC) even opened a special section on its official website for reporting cases of public funds for moon cakes.

The CPC leadership introduced eight rules at the end of 2012 with the aim of rejecting extravagance and excessive formalities among Party members.

By the end of June, 61,703 officials had been disciplined for breaches of the eight-point rules, according to figures from the CCDI.

"The work style of the Party members and officials is of great influence on social climate. Its improvements would benefit the construction of positive value orientation," said Wang Kaiyu, sociologist with the Anhui Academy of Social Sciences.

"The anti-graft campaign led Chinese to cherish the right values and return to the right way to celebrate the traditional festival as a family reunion," he said.