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China

Behind Every Corrupt Chinese Official Is A Woman Who's Not His Wife

GLOBAL TIMES( China), CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY (Taiwan)

Worldcrunch


BEIJING - As a recent wave of corruption has been denounced in China, we have heard of the important role played by bloggers and a progressively more open press. But there's another segment of society that has been absolutely crucial in busting bad politicians: their mistresses. And yes, it seems, they all have one -- and sometimes, many more.

Most recently, Lei Zhengfu, a Chinese Communist Party official from Chongqing lost his post after a journalist uploaded a video of him and his much younger lover having sex.

Having at least one “ernai”, a Chinese way of calling a mistress, the “second wife,”, has become a must among Chinese officials. “A man without a mistress is useless. A man with two or three mistresses is a VIP. A man with five or six lovers is an animal,” sums up the current view on the topic, the Central News Agency reported.

Of course, having an extra-marital relationship is a wildcard for any public figure. When giving discipline courses to Communist party cadres, a Guangdong official from the Central Discipline Inspection Commission drew attention to the “woman issue” of Chinese officials by using the example of Xu Qiyao, the former Director of the Construction Department of Jiangsu Province. He kept 140 mistresses and used to boast that among them were a mother and her daughter. He bragged about this as “killing two birds with one stone.”

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The Global Times added that the mistresses often become officials’ own personal time bombs because of jealousy when the official has drifted off to another lover, or because their demands haven’t been satisfied. The newspaper pointed out that China’s corruption-curbing campaign has had some “interim progress” in recent years, but the problem is “like a seriously ill elderly person. He takes a lot of pain-relieving shots and anti-inflammatory drugs to ease the mental stress. Nevertheless, the real root cause is never cured.”


As for the leading role that the second ladies have in all of this, opinion is mixed. "Though the downfall of corrupt officials is welcome, it is nonetheless vexing that it’s their mistresses who have acquired this role,” the Global Times writes.

According to official statistics from Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, among the investigated officials alleged of taking bribes, nearly 100% of them have at least one mistress. “This means that in Chinese officialdom their mistresses have formed a mighty team of anti-corruption busters," the Global Times wrote, quoting the Gongshi Net, a Chinese website for China’s pro-reform movement.

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Society

Big Brother For The People: India's CCTV Strategy For Cracking Down On Police Abuse

"There is nothing fashionable about installing so many cameras in and outside one’s house," says a lawyer from a Muslim community. And yet, doing this has helped members of the community prove unfair police action against them.

A woman is walking in the distance while a person holds a military-style gun close up

Survellance and tight security at the Lal Chowk area in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India on October 4, 2022

Sukanya Shantha

MUMBAI — When sleuths of the National Investigating Agency suddenly descended on human rights defender and school teacher Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s house on October 11, he knew exactly what he needed to do next.

He had been monitoring the three CCTVs that are installed on the front and the rear of his house — a chawl in Vikhroli, a densely populated area in suburban Mumbai. The cameras told him that a group of men and women — some dressed in Mumbai police’s uniform and a few in civil clothes — had converged outside his house. Some of them were armed and few others with batons were aggressively banging at the door asking him to immediately let them in.

This was not the first time that the police had landed at his place at 5 am.

When the policemen discovered the CCTV cameras outside his house, they began hitting it with their batons, destroying one of them mounted right over the door. This action was captured by the adjacent CCTV camera. Shaikh, holed up in his house with his wife and two children, kept pleading with the police to stop destroying his property and simply show them an official notice.

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