By Dan Martin
BEIJING, Oct 12 AFP - With his alleged harem of young peasant maidens, the late Mao Zedong seemed to have set the gold standard for sexual excess by a Communist Chinese official.
But Mao seems to have some competition in modern-day China’s communist ranks, despite current President Hu Jintao’s anti-corruption crackdown.
One high-flying party official after another has been brought down in recent years by sex scandals that might have made even the Great Helmsman blush.
Consider Pang Jiayu, a top official in the northern province of Shaanxi.
Ongoing investigations into an investment scheme he concocted revealed Pang collected at least 11 mistresses, some of them the wives of Shaanxi notables who sought a cut of the illegal profits, state media reported recently.
Then there was Yang Feng, deputy Communist Party secretary of Xuancheng city in eastern Anhui province until a bribery scandal brought him down.
During his trial last year, it was learned that Yang, who was married, solved the dilemma of juggling his eight lovers by appointing a head'' mistress who managed the others. The official Xinhua news agency reported last month that, of the 16 highest-level officials felled by corruption since 2003, 14 kept mistresses. More than providing mere titillation, such cases contribute to an image of moral degradation in the ruling party that poses a potential political threat, said Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China. When you take this high-profile debauchery, conspicuous consumption by the cadres, and accumulation of great wealth at the top, and you put it all together, it’s explosive,’’ Chang told AFP, noting that violent protests against official misbehaviour regularly flared up.
Mao was alleged by his personal doctor to have abused his exalted position to bed countless peasant girls, but today even rank-and-file cadres are getting in on the act.
A top official with the party’s main disciplinary body recently said 70 per cent of the thousands of corruption cases surrounding party officials each year involved family members or mistresses also benefiting from the graft.
The phenomenon of taking mistresses reflects a general moral decline in booming China that has seen prostitution and other vices flourish as the rich exploit the poor, said Hu Xingdou, a Peking Technology Institute professor and frequent commentator on social issues.
Officials have become morally degenerate and the rot is now spreading from officialdom into society in general. You can be sure the people are disgusted by this,'' he said. In imperial times, moral degeneracy was said to cost dynasties the mandate of heaven’’, or right to rule.
Perhaps mindful of this, the nation’s leadership has railed against such behaviour in the run-up to the five-yearly Communist Party Congress that begins on Monday.
The People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, explicitly warned members not to exchange power for sex'' in a January editorial that said cadres were sinking into a morass of crime and disorder’’.
Meanwhile, new regulations in July banned a range of activities, including abusing power to arrange jobs or set up businesses for relatives or lovers.
Especially deviant officials have been put to death.
Last month, Duan Yihe, a member of China’s parliament, was executed for using a bomb to kill a long-time mistress for whom he had arranged government jobs.
But many believe the tide of sleaze will rise as long as the government refuses to allow oversight by a free press or set up anti-corruption bodies free of party control, to the continued detriment of the nation’s rulers.
``Just as a morally degenerate politician is voted out of office, so a morally degenerate party is eventually abandoned by the people,’’ Peking Institute of Technology’s Hu warned.
The government in China owns and sells everything. The whole idea of socialism was for the means of production to be collectively owned. China is a disguisting dictatorship that wines in the luxury of capitalism yet leaves its citizens void of any rights. Won’t it be bliss when the gold is dished out as thousands live in misery.The olympic spirit is alive and well.
In the paper yesterday, China is second only to the US in Bilionaires- over 100 now!!
How are the rulers of China operating any differently than the IOC officials?
On the sex front, Mao was afraid of getting poisoned, so he never got treatment for his various forms of VD and just kept spreadig it to his unfortunate consorts.
are you serious?
Dead serious.
It’s a sordid union between the world’s most corrupt sports organisation and a brutal dictatorship. Criminals do work better when in alliance.
To their credit, China does occasionally shoot one of theirs.