No bars, no mistresses for Chinese officials

BEIJING – 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 the 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 the bureaucratese to make a clear link between moral lassitude and corruption. One statistic trotted out at a recent speech to bureaucrats: 95 per cent 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.Meanwhile, a campaign against pornography, lewd content and advertising for sexual services has bolstered efforts to control potentially subversive content on the Internet.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,’ according to the government’s General Administration of Press and Publication.- Nampa-AP