XINHUA, CHINA.ORG.CN (China),
BEIJING – There’s a new study in China aimed at finding out more about the lives of the corrupt. Among the findings of the study, dubbed the “Officials’ Image Crisis Report,” was that 95% of Chinese officials being investigated for corruption also kept mistresses, according to Xinhua.
The link between political and economic corruption and having mistresses is of particular interest in China because it is often the way the crooked get caught. Sort of the modern Chinese version of nabbing murderous gangsters by investigating them for tax evasion.
The study by the Crisis Management Research Center at Renmin University found that more than ten high-level Chinese officials had their extra-marital affairs exposed on the Internet in 2012. “According to our statistics, among all the corrupted officials caught in 2012, 95 percent had mistresses and more than 60 percent kept concubines; all of these statistics are worsening the general official image,” said Tang Jun, director of the Crisis Management Research Center at Renmin University.
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Busted! (Wikimedia)
More and more Chinese officials have had to step down in recent years because of sex scandals and corruption cases — or both. Last week, authorities from the city of Chongqing sacked ten departmental-level officials and managers of state-owned companies who were involved in “indecent video” scandals.
Last November, Lei Zhengfu, a district Party secretary –also from Chongqing – was fired after a video of him having sex with his 18-year-old girlfriend in a hotel was posted online.
“In the era of new media, the speed and range of information dissemination has altered. The maintenance of the image of the government and its officials faces huge challenges,” Tan Jun said.
The Chinese public has been calling the mistresses “anti-corruption busters.” Interestingly, said Tan Jun, “a sex scandal is the easiest way to make an official step down. In China, an official’s sex scandal always leads to the exposure of other possibly corrupt and illegal doings on his part,” reported China.org.cn.
