Fascinating development in the Middle Kingdom: Men are taking mistresses.
China's economic boom has led to a revival of the 2-millennium-old tradition of "golden canaries," so called because, like the showcase birds, mistresses here are often pampered, housed in love nests and taken out at the pleasure of their "masters."
Concubines were status symbols in imperial China. After the Communists took power, they sought to root out such bourgeois evils, even as Chairman Mao Tse-tung reportedly kept a harem of peasant women into his old age.
Now, mistresses have become a must-have for party officials, bureaucrats and businessmen. . . .
So-called concubine villages – places where lotharios keep "second wives" in comfort and seclusion – are now spread across the nation, in booming cities such as Dongguan, Chengdu and Shanghai.
So common is the practice that it has spawned an industry of private detectives snooping on cheating husbands and their paramours. One such agency, called Debang, based in the western city of Chengdu, underscores how "first wives" are fighting back.
Debang was started by divorced women with one goal: to help desperate wives ferret out their double- and triple-timing husbands and make them pay for their indiscretions. . . .
The mistress boom is contributing to a surge in divorces – and fierce battles over property when relationships collapse. Not long ago, Beijing amended the country's marriage law to make men who indulge in mistresses pay heavy penalties and to give their spouses greater rights in separations.
Two things interest me:
1. Men far out-number women in China. By taking a mistress, the corrupt official is depriving another man of an honest spouse. Might that do even more to fuel resentment among China's non-privileged?
2. China is still steeped in Communism and Communism has always hated the family. Yet it apparently frowns upon adultery when it comes to the divorce settlement, which makes it far more respectful of the marital bed than the no-fault divorce laws in America, where a spouse can be sleep with ten different people and still receive half of everything.
