China cannot rely on vengeful or conscience-stricken mistresses to blow the whistle on corrupt officials, the newspaper of Beijing’s ruling Communist Party said Wednesday — after several such exposes led some to hail the girlfriends as a new force of graft-busters.
“To pin anti-corruption hopes on them is to go in for evil attacking evil,” the People’s Daily said in an editorial, adding that some ladies seek affairs to blackmail their wealthy, well-connected lovers.
The motives of the mistresses “are the same” as those of the corrupt officials, the editorial declared - “greed.”
China could not rely on such persons to fight corruption, the paper said, according to Reuters news agency.
“It is not the right path for the will of the people.”
Mistresses have blown the whistle on some of the biggest scams to rock Chinese politics.
In one high-profile case this month, Liu Tienan was sacked as deputy chief of China’s top planning agency after his mistress told a reporter that Liu had helped defraud banks of $200 million, state media reported.
The paper noted another case in which a viral Internet video that showed a district party chief having sex with his mistress. The official, Lei Zhengfu, was fired, along with several others in the city of Chongqing.
But his mistress, 24-year-old Zhao Hongxia, was charged with extortion this month for her alleged part in a criminal ring that blackmailed philandering officials by secretly recording their sex sessions.
The People’s Daily editorial was met with skepticism by some users of Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, with one joking that mistresses were better at fighting graft than the police.
• Shaun Waterman can be reached at swaterman@washingtontimes.com.
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