For centuries in feudal China, concubines stood as symbols of wealth and status. The communists decried the practice of keeping er nai (“second wives”) as a bourgeois decadence–a vice of the rich–and officially promoted gender equality. But even they have had a fraught history with mistresses: Mao Zedong’s third wife, Jiang Qing, a onetime B-movie starlet whom he courted while still married, may have been the most evil seductress of them all, wreaking bloody havoc during the Cultural Revolution. Now two decades of get-rich-quick modernization have triggered endemic corruption, accelerated social mobility and undermined traditional mores. That has helped fuel a resurgence in concubines–many of whom, if the current spate of corruption scandals are any measure, are looking to achieve a certain standing themselves. Among businessmen and bureaucrats, an old Chinese proverb is gaining a new currency: “Men only go bad once they get rich, while women only get rich once they go bad.”
Cheng and Li are the most high-profile example of this trend. Li was already married to a senior provincial official when she set her sights on Cheng, the powerful party boss of Guangxi. They began having an affair and, as Li later told investigators, their life of crime began one day in 1992 when both were riding in a chauffeured limousine. Cheng told Li he planned to divorce his wife and marry her instead. Immediately the chauffeur blurted out, “What kind of love can survive in a shack? [You two should] make some money while Mr. Cheng is still in power.” At that, Li said Cheng asked her to go out and “see what business could be done.” In reality, neither of them appeared to need much prodding from a lowly driver or anyone else. In seven years, Cheng and Li amassed nearly $5 million in ill-gotten wealth–through bribes, kickbacks and illicit loans. Li acted as Cheng’s “agent,” pocketing “political donations” of cash, diamond rings and Swiss watches.
Just as most officials are assumed to be at least somewhat corrupt, many Chinese are becoming convinced that “sex and money are intertwined,” says Liu Dalin, a retired sociology professor from Shanghai University who has opened China’s first museum devoted to the history of sexuality. The cycle they imagine is a vicious one. Wealthy officials and businessmen seek out dalliances with attractive young women as a perquisite–and measure–of their riches. As mistresses place greater demands on their men for material comforts and baubles, the “sugar daddies” desperately seek more moneymaking opportunities, including illegal ones. “The girl wants you to buy things and you have no choice,” says Liu. “We have an expression: where there is corruption, there’s sex. And where there’s sex, there’s corruption.”
Well-to-do men can spend $700 to $1,000 a month on their mistresses, about half for rent and the rest for miscellaneous expenditures like shopping and health-club memberships. One elegant young woman in her 20s, who revealed only her surname, Su, says she receives more than $2,400 a month from a wealthy businessman in Guangdong province–a staggering sum that is triple China’s annual per capita income. Still, she complains that her lover visits only once or twice a month to inspect his factory and, besides, he’s “too reserved.” Which may help explain why, on one recent evening, she appeared to be infatuated with another businessman. “She wanted me to be her boyfriend, but I don’t have the time,” he says. Actually, he claims, she’s “very loyal to her boyfriend–except when she’s with me.”
Others are corrupted without spending a penny. One manager of a state-owned company in Sichuan took “bribes” from construction contractors in the form of a new apartment–complete with an all-expenses-paid concubine comfortably ensconced inside. “The manager didn’t take money, but he liked women,” says Wei Wujun, a Shanghai-based private detective who tailed the manager and collected evidence on two of the mistresses. Wei’s clients, colleagues of the man, used the incriminating proof to force the dishonest manager to retire.
A lurid portrait of entwined greed and lust has emerged in the Chinese media, which has gleefully highlighted a string of sensational scandals involving officials with mistresses or compromised by this kind of “sexual bribery.” According to state media, 95 percent of people accused of economic crimes in southern Guangdong–one of China’s wealthiest provinces–had at least one extramarital lover. The former vice governor of Hubei province, Meng Qingping, accepted $18,000 in bribes to help support not just one but four mistresses–and seemed unrepentant about his excesses even after being sentenced in 1999 to ten years in prison.
Even many cadres with the job of policing others have themselves succumbed to temptation. Both the now disgraced former Public Security vice minister Li Jizhou and his mistress are alleged by authorities to have earned vast sums of money from a $6 billion smuggling operation in Xiamen purportedly run by Lai Changxin, who is currently seeking political asylum in Canada. Among other things, Lai, who reportedly had a mistress himself, built a seven-story pleasure palace called the “Red Mansion” in Xiamen where beautiful hostesses entertained top government and military officials–and where secret videotapes were reportedly made for use in blackmailing key clients. (Lai denies any wrongdoing and says he’s being scapegoated by mainland leaders.) Yet the link between concubines and corruption is hardly a simple one. Beijing would obviously prefer to blame dragon ladies instead of the Communist Party for China’s alarming rise in institutional graft. Corruption caused $153 billion in economic losses from 1995 to 1999–up to 17 percent of average GDP during that period, according to economist Hu Angang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Crooked dealings by officials approaching retirement age (60 for men) are so prevalent that Chinese talk about a “59-year-old syndrome.” In fact, many of China’s bent bureaucrats began amassing their ill-gotten gains before acquiring mistresses. Chinese sex-ologist Li Yinhe, who heads the Marriage and Family Research Office of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, hotly disputes any link between sexual infidelity and corruption. “Sex is not the reason why officials go corrupt. In their eyes, concubines and mistresses are commodities, like a Mercedes-Benz or a villa… Corruption arises out of greed, not lust.”
Still, whatever the extent of their influence, the number of concubines is indisputably on the rise. Good estimates are hard to come by for obvious reasons, but evidence can be discerned in related statistics. By 1997 the official divorce rate was 13 percent–compared with just 3 percent two decades earlier. Li says that in many major cities the rate exceeds 20 percent. Detective Wei says 80 percent of the cases he’s handled since 1993 involve wives seeking proof of their husbands’ mistresses; he also claims that 80 percent of divorces are triggered by such “third parties.”
A large part of the problem involves Overseas Chinese. At least 100,000 mainland mistresses are believed to live in the Pearl River Delta region alone, kept by Hong Kong and Taiwan executives who routinely travel to Guangdong province on business. So many Hong Kong “sugar daddies” make the weekend train trip from the former British colony to Guangdong that the rail line has been dubbed “The Concubine Express.” (Hong Kong authorities say the territory’s businessmen may have fathered as many as half a million illegitimate children across the province.) Taiwanese in Shanghai’s notorious Gubeikou district are said to have taken up concubine “sharing,” in which male friends swap mistresses.
Boomtowns like Shenzhen and Shanghai are full of upscale enclaves known as “concubine villages,” or ernai cun. Residents are overwhelmingly long-term mistresses, or moonlighting wanna-bes on the lookout for a well-heeled man to keep them. One of the most infamous residential complexes is Huayuan Xincun in the industrial Guangdong town of Dongguan, not far from Hong Kong. The community is packed with trendy beauty parlors, boutiques and health clubs catering to stylishly dressed young women. Shiny Mercedes and Audis dot the area. Smoky coffee shops are packed at night with couples. Local businessmen say the town of 7 million has no fewer than 847 karaoke parlors offering the sexual services of an estimated 300,000 women, mostly from poor inland provinces or the northeastern rust belt of China.
Technically, there’s a difference–and a hierarchy–between a kept woman, a karaoke hostess who entertains men sexually, a naive freelancer and a prostitute. But in China’s fast-changing social landscape, subtleties are easily clouded. “Most prostitutes want to be concubines, and many concubines become prostitutes, especially if they’ve been abandoned,” says Wei. On a recent evening, a 20-year-old who calls herself Xiao Lan approaches men leaving the Silverland Hotel in Dongguan. She looks like any other factory worker, with an innocent toothy grin. In fact she is a factory worker, she says, toiling at a nearby bag-manufacturing factory; she holds up a backpack festooned with cartoons. Two other girls, 20 and 26, approach a male passerby, offering to come to his room for $24 each. They work in an electronics factory earning just $84 a month. “I’m not out here every night,” says the older one, “I just do this to earn some spending money when I want to buy clothes.”
The nonchalance with which many Chinese regard the occupation of a xiaojie, or “miss” (as sex workers are euphemistically called), is a measure of how quickly they’ve embraced Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “to get rich is glorious.” Twenty years ago Chinese were more tightly governed by social norms. “Today the only thing that matters is money,” says Maria Tam, professor of anthropology at Hong Kong’s Chinese University. Being a concubine is better than being a prostitute, of course, and many girls moonlight in karaoke clubs or massage parlors with the sole ambition of becoming a “second wife.” Being an er nai can come to seem like an ordinary job. “The guy comes to see you once or twice a month, and you get a few thousand yuan. It’s a rational economic choice,” says Tam. “You can send money home, and tell people you’re making it.”
Still, the practice does have its victims–if not swindled citizens then at least wronged spouses. In Hong Kong the religious group Caritas has been helping distraught women of the “first wives’ club.” The organization opened a counseling hot line for fretful spouses in October 1995–and has received more than 150,000 calls since then.
On the mainland, outrage over cheating helped push through a controversial revision of China’s marriage law in April. Chinese media, telephone hot lines, government surveys and daytime-TV talk shows were full of fierce debate over proposed changes that granted greater rights to the spouses of philanderers, including the right to financial compensation. Stormy public controversies erupted over esoterica such as the definition of a “second wife” (someone who lives with an already married man for six months?), or how far the government should intrude into citizens’ private affairs (should one-night stands be illegal, and police used to arrest adulterers?). Feminists weren’t always sure if they should fight for the rights of wronged wives–or fear intrusions by Big Brother.
The law that was finally passed prohibits both bigamy and cohabitation outside marriage. (The previous version barred only bigamy.) Under the new law, women who divorce because of a “second wife” or domestic abuse can seek financial compensation. The penalty for miscreant spouses is up to two years in prison.
But many Chinese wives are finding that “cohabitation outside marriage” isn’t easy to prove. Lipstick marks or phone calls to another woman aren’t sufficient. Tape-recorded evidence isn’t accepted in court; nor is testimony from private detectives like Wei whose legal status remains murky. Last month Chinese were titillated to learn of a Chongqing housewife who wanted to sue her husband under the new law. Turns out her mynah bird–a species known for its ability to mimic human speech–startled its owner by blurting out the phrases “I love you,” “divorce” and (everyone’s favorite) “be patient.” She excitedly carted the bird to a law office hoping it would be allowed to “testify” in court. The lawyers weren’t encouraging.
Scaling back the practice of concubinage will take more than paper reforms. Strolling at night in Gubeikou, Wei points out the dozens of fresh-faced women that he surmises are mistresses. “That one who’s clinging to her man, she’s not his long-term partner,” he observes, pointing to a ponytailed twentysomething, “She’s acting girlish, hopeful; she’s looking forward to a new life.” So are hundreds of millions of citizens striving to get ahead in today’s China, which explains why many–both concubines and corrupt men–will cut corners to get there.
