Chinese officials are being told to dump their mistresses, avoid hostess bars and shun extravagances as part of the Communist Party’s efforts to clamp down on corruption that is threatening its rule and sullying its reputation.
The language of the new morality push, one of countless such campaigns informally under way, is surprisingly bold, often cutting through bureaucratese to make a clear link between moral lassitude and corruption. One statistic trotted out at a recent speech to bureaucrats: 95 percent of officials investigated for corruption were found to be keeping mistresses.
“It’s just not possible to keep a mistress on your salary because maintaining this sort of extravagant lifestyle requires a large amount of cash money,” Qi Peiwen, a party discipline enforcer, told officials in southern China.
“So what do you do if you don’t have the money? Naturally, you’ll use the power at your disposal to go find some,” Qi said, according to a transcript carried by state media.
The message was reinforced in a series of speeches at party academies last month by Li Yuanchao (李源潮). He runs the organization department that controls senior appointments.
60 YEAR HISTORY
Morality drives date back long before the Communist Party seized power in 1949, but the current one seems to stem more from a recognition that rampant corruption threatens to undermine the party’s authority and permanently warp the value system of the rapidly developing nation of 1.3 billion people.
Meanwhile, a campaign against pornography, lewd content and advertising for sexual services has bolstered efforts to control potentially subversive Internet content.
Authorities recently banned more than 1,400 erotic writings and 20 Web sites, including those that discussed one-night stands, wife-swapping, sexual abuse and violence that “disregarded common decency,” the government’s General Administration of Press and Publication said.
Without fixed definitions of what constitutes indecent material, the drive allows censors virtually unfettered authority to block material, including scads of blogs and personal networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and tumblr.
Not everyone is so willing to comply, however. This year the government has had to drop a heavy-handed attempt to increase Internet censorship by ordering pornography filters to be installed on all computers. It provoked a litany of complaints including that it denied access to much material that could not reasonably be considered offensive.
That clampdown is part of a wider trend in Chinese society — the gradual decline in the party’s ability to insert itself into citizens’ personal affairs.
HARD WORK
June Teufel Dreyer, a China expert at the University of Miami, thinks the morality drive might stem from “the idea that pleasure-loving people don’t work as hard as they should.”
Chinese have toiled for 30 years to build their country’s economic might, and “doubtless the leadership has noticed that in other societies, the prosperity-creating generation is likely to be succeeded by a frivolous generation,” Dreyer said.
In one prominent example, Chen Liangyu (陳良宇), a Politburo member and former Shanghai party boss, became the most powerful official to fall in recent years. He was accused of being a greedy Lothario who indulged his sexual urges with multiple girlfriends. The focus on Chen’s alleged indecency was seen as an attempt to weaken support for him among other officials whose careers he had nurtured.
During the morality campaign, party officials could receive demerits on their character assessments if found patronizing hostess bars, where young women accompany men in drinking, singing and often much more, said Li, the organization department chief.
The campaign coincides with the sentencing of 16 high-ranking officials this year, four times more than last year. In the end, however, the campaign’s effectiveness may be fleeting, largely because it could expose much more corruption than the party had bargained for.
“Then, gradually, the old patterns will reassert themselves,” Dreyer said.
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