A CHINESE government official has been detained by police after allegedly accepting bribes so he could satisfy his formidable sexual appetite and meet his target of sleeping with up to 800 women.
The 47-year-old department head in the eastern city of Anqing was turned in by his wife last month after she discovered his diaries, containing detailed records of his sexual peccadilloes and bribe payments.
The news comes just days after China’s government warned public officials of the temptations of beautiful women, money and power in an attempt to improve the Communist Party’s public image.
The Dahe Daily, giving the cadre the pseudonym Wang Cheng, said he secretly recorded the trysts on his hard drive, which was also discovered along with the diaries.
Mr Wang’s goals were remarkably specific: “This year I must have sex with 56 women. At least two of them must not be prostitutes,” he said on the first day of 2003; also he wanted to have two mistresses “from respectable families”.
His diaries boast of bedding at least 500 women and, in his new year’s resolutions, he set himself the goal of having sex with “600 to 800”.
In 2003, he wrote that he required a monthly income of 8,000 yuan (€876) to pay for his lifestyle; his monthly salary was only 1,600 yuan (€176) then.
However, the figure is believed to have increased significantly as Mr Wang’s influence grew through his involvement in real estate deals, a notoriously corrupt area of public life in China. This meant bigger kickbacks, while the companies would also bribe him with sexual favours.
He admitted spending hundreds of thousands of yuan buying sex.
“He was busy eight hours a day seeking bribes and eight hours a day as a hooligan seeking sex,” the paper quoted prosecutors as saying.
Mr Wang’s wife reportedly found the sex diary on his hard drive when she was looking for something in the apartment of her in-laws. She was so angry that she fell ill after going through the diary and sex videos, the report said. A friend of his wife sent the evidence to the local prosecutor’s office.
Mr Wang was arrested on March 21st. He confessed that he spent all the bribe money on “lovers”.
Corruption by communist cadres is often identified as a major source of dissatisfaction among the populace and the party has been trying to stamp it out, taking some high-profile scalps in the process.
This is only the latest case of corrupt cadres engaging in sexual shenanigans. Last month, an official in Guangxi province was sacked and arrested after his diary detailing sexual hi-jinks and bribery was splashed across the internet.