September 9, 2007
RECENT ARTICLES in the foreign media may have given the impression that despite fifty years or so of Communism, odious traditions such as the concubine are making a comeback among China's corrupt political elite.
Chinese society is so complex, so multifaceted, and so bewildering that it helps to be able to reduce it to a few simple tropes. These, generally, involve the idea that the three decades or so of Chairman Mao's leadership were nothing more than a tempestuous but temporary battle against a set of Chinese characteristics that are normally described by the foreign media as "Confucianism". They also involve the idea that Chairman Mao would now be spinning in his grave, if he actually had one.
There is also the general implication that following the scorched-earth millenarianism of the Maoist era, China is somehow reverting to type. Thus, an enfeebled political elite desperately tries to retain its hold over an uncontrollable and irrepressible people. Violence and cruelty reign. Poverty and injustice prevail. China is caught in the same ruinous cycle of greed and failure, and the majority of the country's leaders are in it merely for themselves.
It is certainly true that most of the high-profile examples of corruption or bad behaviour in the last few years have involved officials who - among other things - were accused of using government cash to finance at least one mistress. Some of the famous cases include disgraced former Shanghai boss Chen Liangyu, accused of pilfering his city's social security funds, and the ex-chairman of the National Bureau of Statistics, Qiu Xiaohua, also thought to be implicated in the Shanghai scandal. The recently "resigned" Minister of Finance, Jin Renqing, caught in the middle of a sordid love triangle, seems likely to be the next on the list.
A recent survey by The Beijing News said that 14 of the 16 senior officials convicted of corruption in the last five years had also kept mistresses. The implication is that China's ruling elite is being undermined by a peculiar type of debauchery that has its roots in the country's pre-revolutionary past.
A particularly feudal touch was evident in Baoji in Shaanxi Province, where ex-Communist Party boss Pang Jiayu has been accused of imposing a sort of droit de cuissage on his subordinates, who have eagerly offered him their wives in exchange for patronage.
It is also certainly true that there is a long harem tradition among China's ruling elites. There were special administrative departments designed to run the Emperor's concubinages. When the Emperor died in 1622, presumably through exhaustion, eight of his "wives" happened to be pregnant.
But we'd be kidding ourself if we thought that this was a specifically Chinese problem. Human history is littered with such behaviour, and Chairman Mao was certainly no worse than, say, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk. Polygynistic chiefdoms were constantly undermined by rival claims to succession by the hundreds of offspring borne by the departed king. In the Middle East, potentates and their kin continue to practice polygamy. And as late as the nineteenth century, it was commonplace for settlers in America to acquire additional families in the plantations.
