Ms Li is emblematic of the ethics-free, corrupt underbelly to the New China, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Beijing
CHINA’S MOST powerful mistress is 1.63m (5’4”), has long straight hair and wears brightly coloured dresses to highlight her elegant curves. Li Wei’s beauty was a weapon she used to break into the secretive bastion of powerful men that tightly control China, and more than a dozen top cadres fell under her spell and helped her build a multimillion- euro business empire in return for sexual favours.
“You cannot invest all your resources and opportunities into one person, you have to construct a huge relationship net, like an umbrella,” she once told the tight circle around her. In her diaries, which she has not released in full and which contain revelations about other senior cadres, she said she had affairs with 15 powerful figures above the rank of deputy chairman or governor.
Now living in Hong Kong, Ms Li has given a no-holds-barred interview with the Caijing business magazine, which details her remarkable career and contains fresh allegations of “immoral relationships” with high-ranking officials, including cabinet members.
Concubines have made a real comeback in freewheeling New China, and many rich men have a mistress, or “er nai”, which translates as “second breast”, so many that the government is considering changing divorce laws to better protect wives against greedy mistresses. According to a survey by state prosecutors, more than 90 per cent of the country’s most senior officials punished on serious graft charges in the past five years have kept mistresses.
At its peak her business empire comprised more than 20 companies in Beijing, Qingdao, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, as well as abroad. Industries included tobacco, real estate, advertising, petrol, stocks and bonds. Her assets were worth more than €1 billion.
Li Wei is the queen of these courtesans and the list of her lovers is a study in Chinese power.
Born in Vietnam in 1963 of mixed French-Vietnamese parentage, at the age of seven she moved with her father to Honghe county in China’s southern Yunnan province along the Sino-Vietnamese border, a refugee searching for a better life.
She sold tobacco as a youngster, but her incredible ability to manipulate the arcane system of building connections combined with her considerable allure, transformed her into a formidable power broker.
Zheng Shaodong, former chief investigations officer at the ministry of public security in Guangdong province, obtained her residence permit for her. After earning legitimate resident status, she married a top official at the local tobacco bureau. Through her husband, Ms Li managed to gain access to former Yunnan governor Li Jiating, who became her lover.
She helped Mr Li get resident status for his son in Hong Kong, in exchange for tobacco export quotas. The governor narrowly escaped the death sentence in 2003 for taking more €21 million in bribes. She became involved with Du Shicheng, the former party secretary of the rich city of Qingdao in Shandong province. Through her relationship with Mr Du, she secured top-notch real estate in Qingdao, a coastal city that was once a German protectorate, and soon became one of the city’s biggest property developers. Mr Du introduced her to his good friend, Chen Tonghai, the chairman of Sinopec, China’s mighty oil and gas giant. He too became Ms Li’s lover, and he gave her gifts of millions of shares in companies owned by Sinopec.
It was revelations by Mr Du that precipitated Mr Chen’s downfall.
Others closely linked to Ms Li are Liu Zhihua, the former vice mayor of Beijing who kept several mistresses in his pleasure palace in the capital but was jailed for real estate corruption in the run-up to the Olympics; Huang Songyou, the former deputy head of the Supreme Court; Chang Wangyi, one-time deputy governor of China Development Bank.
For many Chinese, Ms Li is emblematic of the ethics-free, corrupt underbelly to the New China, where unscrupulous property developers, crooked businesspeople and greedy cadres conspire to enrich themselves at whatever cost.