The latest mistress scandal to tantalize China involves Fan Yue, a deputy director at the State Administration of Archives.
His 26-year-old mistress, Ji Yingnan, posted pictures of them online (including the photo, left). She went public in a big way when she found out about his wife and teenage son — after Fan had asked her to marry him but forgot to mention his other family.
Among Ji’s public revelations was that Fan gave her more than $1,000 a day in walking-around money and a luxury car, despite her lover’s modest government salary.
News service Xinhua said Fan was fired from his government job a few months ago and is being investigated for graft.
In May, Liu Tienan, a deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, was fired after a former mistress told a journalist he had defrauded banks out of $200 million. He’s also accused now of taking massive bribes.
A China government report in 2007 said 90% of top officials fired after corruption scandals had kept at least one mistress, the BBC reported.
Former Railways Minister ‘Great Leap’ Liu Zhijun was given a suspended death sentence in July after a corruption conviction. Before his fall from power, he had been keeping 18 mistresses, according to reports.
The BBC said,
China’s top sexologist, Li Yinghe, believes that many Chinese men believe they are still living in imperial times. “I think many Chinese men have an emperor’s complex,” she says. “Being an emperor means you can have many women. This is something they are proud of. They see women as trophies of their success.”
The Beijing Evening Daily estimated in 2010 that 200,000 mistresses were living in apartments in Beijing alone, the Atlantic said this week.
The graft reports coming from mistresses are evidently an embarrassment for the Communist Party. The People’s Daily, a party mouthpiece, warned that China shouldn’t depend on the women to expose corruption. Mistresses are part of the graft problem, an editorial in the paper said, not part of the solution.
But with so many ladies out there who may one day be seeking revenge, the sex-and-corruption scandals won’t be going away anytime soon.
The FCPA Blog’s 2012 report on China’s top five mistress scandals is here.
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Richard L. Cassin is the Publisher and Editor of the FCPA Blog. He can be contacted here.
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