Asia Sentinel

A surprising number of Chinese business leaders’ wives share in the larceny

The late December arrest of Du Juan, the wife of Huang Guangyu, China’s richest businessman, points up how often the wives and mistresses of eminent and not-so-eminent Chinese have played key roles in driving their loved ones to enormous wealth – and sometimes to prison.

Huang, formerly chairman of Gome Group, China’s largest consumer electronics retailer, was arrested in late November and is under investigation for insider trading. Du herself was arrested outside Beijing and taken to a police station in the capital, where she is being questioned in connection with economic crimes. Huang was worth US$6.3 billion according to the Hurun Rich List of 2008 at the time of his arrest.

What is reported regularly in the Chinese media – wives or mistresses following their prominent mates into prison for corporate crimes (although there is plenty of man-and-wife conventional crime in the west) is rare enough in the western press to make people scratch their heads. In China, however, this partnership in power goes back at least to the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), who controlled the country for the last 40 years of the Qing dynasty, acquiring bullion, antiques, jewellery and an estimated £8.5 million sterling in banks in London – although she never left China. Song Mei-ling, wife of President Chiang Kai-shek, amassed a fortune for herself and her family between her marriage to him in 1927 and her death in 2003, at the age of 105.

Du Juan is typical of a new generation of smart, ambitious and well-educated Chinese women who use their charm and beauty to attract men of wealth and power and work together with them to amass a fortune. The most famous is Wendi Deng, the daughter of a modest family, who studied at California State University Northridge and Yale and, after marrying once before, snagged the twice-married media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, 37 years her senior, in June 1999.

The women are a product of one of the great achievements of the Communist era – equality of education for women and a nearly equal place in the workforce, giving them opportunities which their grandmothers never had. “Women hold up half the sky,” Mao Zedong famously said, a statement that to many Chinese women meant they were going to have to shoulder a bigger share of the workload.

(One of those who appear to have shouldered rather too much of the workload is Wu Shu-chen, the wife of disgraced former Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian, who was accused of embezzling NT14.8 million (US$45,000) from a government slush fund using faked documents. In the west, she keeps company with Patti Blagojevich, the wife of impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. She was described in a Chicago Tribune article as a “modern-day Lady Macbeth who plotted against her husband’s perceived enemies and backed his corrupt schemes.”)

In China, the extraordinary growth of the last three decades and the close ties between politics and economic power have created opportunities unparalleled in China’s history for those with access to money, technology and political patronage. And that isn’t to say the men themselves haven’t had plenty to do with it.

The collective Puritanism of the Maoist era has been replaced by a pre-1949 moral order, in which the rich and powerful can acquire many wives, official and unofficial. They can rent a mistress for a year, two years or the long term: everything can be negotiated for a price. Of the 41 minister-level officials convicted of bribery since 2000, 36 had mistresses. The men had an average age of 63, the wives 60 and their mistresses 51.4, with some in their 30s. These are the ideal conditions for women with looks, drive and talent to fulfill their ambitions through their husbands or lovers.

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