Corrupt Chinese officials have restored the ancient Chinese tradition of keeping a mistress or two, writes Clifford Coonanin Beijing
CONCUBINE YANG was China’s most famous mistress, one of the Four Beauties who so besotted the Emperor Xuanzong that he lost his reason and was forced to execute her to prove he had the will to rule. The emperor ultimately lost his grip on power and the glorious Tang dynasty (618-907) went into steady decline.
Last month, Chen Tonghai, the former chairman of the oil giant Sinopec, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, in China’s biggest bribery case. He was convicted of illegally receiving 196 million yuan (€20 million) during his reign, but for many Chinese, the part of the story which angered them most was how Chen’s mistress, Li Wei, prospered from her property firm in Qingdao which bought land linked to a huge oil refinery project in the eastern Chinese city at prices below market value.
Angry messages online said that behind every corrupt official, there’s a scheming mistress.
Concubinage has a long history in China and was common right up to early 20th century. Emperors and warlords kept many concubines as well as wives, and the wives sometimes even gave their husbands concubines, known as “drinking vinegar”.
The more concubines a man had, the greater his status and wealth. A concubine’s status was less than that of a wife and any children legally belonged to their master’s wife not themselves. They were sometimes called “little wives”.
The practice was abolished as decadent and corrupt under the rule of chairman Mao Zedong, but China’s freewheeling capitalist ways, with more openness, prosperity and corruption has witnessed a return to the era of the kept woman. Concubine culture is back in a big way.
The young women who become concubines do it for many reasons, chiefly money and lifestyle, but also social advancement, as it can mean a way out of a poor existence.
“My son is already two-years-old, and my son’s father is the same age as my father, I call him ‘old man’,” wrote one anonymous 20-year-old concubine in an online posting.
“He treats me well. Since I gave birth to a son, he bought a 180 square metre house under my name and two shops under my son’s name,” she wrote.
“My days are very comfortable. I never ask him about his business and family, nor require him to divorce. I just think, a woman’s life is hard, and her youth goes quickly, so I cherish the present,” she wrote.
“I am in love with this ‘old man’. If a man can’t find what he needs in his family, he’s going to look for a concubine. Because of me, he is more successful in business, enjoys a more harmonious family life,” she said.
You can see these modern-day concubines in the shopping malls and cafes of China’s cities in the south and east. Many of the wives are perfectly aware their husbands are keeping mistresses but say nothing, in a modern version of “drinking vinegar”.
Of course it’s not just government officials who keep mistresses, and many successful businessmen also have young lovers, but the idea of party cadres with concubines has caused widespread anger.
It is estimated that around 90 per cent of the country’s most senior officials punished for “serious” graft in the past five years have kept mistresses.
They need the kickback money to pay for the expensive lifestyles of their second wives.
These include some of the biggest scalps in a raft of corruption scandals in recent years, including former Shanghai party chief Chen Liangyu, who was sacked in 2006, and ex-Beijing vice-mayor, Liu Zhihua, fired for taking bribes and helping his mistress “seek profit” while in charge of Olympic venue construction.
Pang Jiayu, a senior cadre in Shaanxi province, had the nickname “Zipper Mayor” because of his weakness for the “pretty and young” wives of his subordinates when he was mayor of Baoji.
After their husbands were sentenced to death or jailed for their involvement in a financial firm approved by Pang that lost millions of yuan, they decided to take revenge and 11 of the women filed a joint complaint to the party with evidence of his corruption.
Duan Yihe, former party chief of Jinan, capital of the northeast province of Shandong, was given a suspended death sentence in 2007 for killing his mistress with a car bomb after he became tired of her constant demands for money.
Anti-corruption investigators in the southern city of Dongguan, near Shenzhen, have become expert at using mistresses to reveal details of “pillow talk” by officials to nail the transgressors.
A popular web posting is the 12 Guinness records of concubinage, which lists some of the more remarkable feats of venality by public officials.
Yang Feng, the former deputy secretary of Xuancheng city in Anhui province, was found during his corruption trial to have kept eight mistresses whom he managed using corporate management skills learnt during his MBA programme. He appointed one as top mistress, who supervised the others, but his scheme collapsed when his “manager” turned him in after a younger candidate applied for the leadership position.
The current record holder for the number of mistresses, known in China as an “er nai” or “second breast”, is Xu Qiyao, the ex-head of Jiangsu province’s construction department, who counted 140 women as his mistresses, including a mother and daughter.
A state textile industry bureau vice-director in Hainan kept four steel closets containing 95 diaries in which he recorded each sexual relationship, as well as hair samples from 236 different women.
After the death of Concubine Yang, the emperor pined for his lost love as his dynasty collapsed around him. The resolute clampdown by the Communist Party on modern-day concubinage is calculated to ensure the outcome for local cadres is less poetic, and less destabilising.