Keeping a woman is common among powerful Chinese men. A study by the Crisis Management Centre at Renmin University in Beijing showed that 95 per cent of corrupt officials had illicit affairs, usually paid for, and 60 per cent of them had kept a mistress. [...]
“If you’re an official, you have to have a mistress, or at least a girlfriend,” Xiaoxue said, “otherwise you’re not a real man. I used to have this friend who was a fake mistress. She was best friends with a gay guy—not a “duck” [male prostitute], just a normal gay guy—who was an official’s boyfriend. So the official would pay her to come out with him and pretend to be his mistress.” [...]
The pragmatic approach of rural women leaves them better off than the educated urban girls who can also end up as mistresses. These urban women usually meet older men through regular work, and the relationship begins through genuine attraction. As they’ve maintained their “purity” through not being involved in other sex work, they have a higher market value than the rural girls, and they’re more socially acceptable at high-end occasions. [...]
Chinese men’s penchant for mistresses is sometimes attributed to deep-seated cultural expectations, and it’s true that Chinese culture has rarely paid even lip service to ideas of male fidelity. Yet modern reformers often singled out concubinage as a sign of China’s backwardness, and pressed for stronger roles for women. Some, such as modern China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen, or its first chairman, Mao Tse-tung, did so even as they pressed teenage girls into their beds. Modern mistress-keeping might seem like a step back to the distant past. But this is just an excuse: any society as dominated by male leaders, and with as vast a chasm between the elite and the poor, sees the same exploitation of young women by powerful men.
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