China and Beijing is a little less sexually open than some of its neighbors, such as Thailand and South Korea, and it is certainly not as kinky as Japan. But recently, the concubine culture brought trouble for China's bosses...
However corruption in the form of sexual misconduct isn't new in China, where relationships have always driven business dealings. What is new is that social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat now instantly expose the gritty details. Mistresses of local officials or state company bosses cannot resist posting photos of themselves with luxury handbags, a new car, or on a spa vacation. The resent governmental crackdown will hurt a unique group of high-end retail consumers: mistresses or “second wives,” who are defined by both their consumption by men as well as their own need to consume. Mistresses are big business in China, where no official is a real man without his own mistresses. Even a district in Shenzhen has become known as 'Second Wife Village' for the number of mistresses living there.
According to HSBC, about one-quarter of global sales for LV and Gucci came from the Chinese mainland, as well as one-third of annual revenues for Prada and Richemont, the owner of Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels huge figures, given that China ranked approximately 90th globally in terms of per capita income, just on par with Jamaica. As Chinese officials face more scrutiny in the months to come, luxury sales will be a telling gage of the new crackdowns’ effectiveness.
The Second Wife or Er Nai
Second Wife culture is just one part of a much bigger and more interesting area which is the difference between love and marriage in China and the West. Marriage in the west is rooted in romantic passion, and although that passion evolves over time we basically assume that if it's is gone from marriage it's a shallow marriage. Yes, there are other concerns that surround it, children, money but it's not the core of the relationship.
In China it's fundamentally true that a marriage is not between two individuals, it's between two clans. Marriage is a way that people connect into a broader society in which the individual is not the basic productive unit. This has always been the case.
In China, a romance is not ideal unless it is also accompanied by commitment. In Chinese, when we translate "a diamond is forever", we don't mean that passion lasts forever. It translates as "he will do anything for you, forever". And that's why people buy a lot of things for their mistresses, that affection needs to be demonstrated, too. To a certain extent quite different way from the western world.
There are many ranks of "courtesan" in China, and the ernai is at the top of the heap. Many KTV girls and high class “escorts” dream of meeting a man that will make them his second wife. A further distinction is sometimes made between ernai, who ‘know their place’, and xiaosan, ‘little threes’ (as in ‘third party’), who try to insinuate themselves between a lover and his wife with the aim of forcing divorce and remarriage. In practice, the terms are used interchangeably, but the difference matters especially to urban girls seeking to distinguish themselves from their rural counterparts. Most xiaosan have a steady job and a higher educational background than an ernai. Xiaosan expect to marry the man because they’ve invested so much of their youth and their love.
‘Old oxen chew young grass’
There are millions, of ernai, second wives in China. Several years ago did a ernai called Li Na speak out about her experiences. The 24-year-old from Jiangsu province had a blog about her life as a concubine. For years, she has been the mistress of a man who is old enough to be her father. "Society calls us ernai. It is not a job that any of us would choose to do when we were children. Some do it for money. Others for love. Many, like me, do it because they have suffered some cruelty and feel desperate and alone" she said. Li Na distinguished being a mistress from short-term hostessing, where you had to be a perfect servant, always putting the man’s needs first. ‘If you’re too nice to him all the time, he’ll know it isn’t true,’ she said. ‘If he looks at another woman, you should be jealous and sulk all evening until he apologies, so he knows you care.’
An enormous amount of off-book money sloshes around Chinese business and officialdom. As well as paying for her apartment and buying her gifts, Li Na’s ‘uncle’ provided her with a living allowance of ‘about 20,000 yuan ($3,200) a month’. This was about the average for Beijing; in smaller towns, 10,000 yuan might be acceptable, or even 5,000. At the top end, a mistress might receive 10,000 yuan in spending money every day.
No society has swung more dramatically from extreme sexual openness to prudish orthodoxy and then to the sexually ambiguous atmosphere we see at present. There are also risks, especially at a time when the gender imbalance caused by selective abortion has meant a shortage of young women and a consequent cadre of sexually frustrated, bitter young Chinese men.
“you have several million westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to get sexual satisfaction... On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who starve, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality”