Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Less of a good life now

WHERE MONEY TALKS

China's bureaucrats are under strict orders to forgo consorts and concubines.

If China's first revolution was politics and the second economics, the third revolution is about sex. Chinese bureaucrats are under strict orders from the Ministry of Personnel to forgo the consorts and concubines that were integral to Ching expansiveness and Communist libertarianism.

Thousands of concubines used to laze and loiter in the Forbidden City's Great Within; Mao Zedong frolicked with his bevy of beauties. No fewer than 11 secret mistresses testified against Pang Jiayu, Baoji city's party chief. But the new China will be as strait-laced "" almost as suburbia in the American Mid-West.

This is a rebuff for that prophet of pragmatism Deng Xiaoping whose "socialism with Chinese characteristics" amounted to capitalism with consumerism. Market Leninism, as his blend of free market economics with the ancient and honourable Chinese practice of extensive harems was called, is driving China into bankruptcy. Hence, to the Four Modernisations "" agriculture, industry, science and technology "" has been added a fifth. No secret mistresses for civil servants. The ban appears to indicate that a formally acknowledged concubine listed as Wife Number Two is a perfectly acceptable Chinese characteristic. But no more. Apparently, these hidden mistresses were siphoning away too much money and taking massive cuts on contracts. When Chen Liangyu was Shanghai's party boss, the city's social security funds disappeared into his lady love's maws. Construction for the Olympics yielded a bonanza for the woman who secretly pleasured Beijing's vice-mayor, Liu Zhihua. Costs can be adjusted to accommodate the voracity of a Wife Number Two, even if she is Madam Ten Per Cent like some First Ladies. But the authorities never knew how many lucrative mice all these sleeping partners, black and white, were catching.

The revolution smashed China's iron rice bowl by abolishing guaranteed lifetime employment but encouraged a proliferation of solid gold rice bowls. That is why notwithstanding booming growth, massive savings and spiralling foreign exchange reserves, officially China has far fewer millionaires (with millionaires a dime a dozen, economists and statisticians should really talk of billionaires) than India. Actually, China's millionaires/billionaires are not businessmen but bureaucrats. With the government and country at their feet, private fortunes are unnecessary. To be rich is a glorious form of collectivisation. Public funds are for the public which means a convenient reinterpretation of needs and means in accordance with the principle of "to each according to his needs, from each according to his means."

One man who fears that civil servants have interpreted Deng's "poverty is not socialism" maxim too literally for their own good is Guangdong province health bureau's vice-director, Liao Xinbo. Guangdong's streets being paved with gold, a survey of working and retired officials revealed the perils of affluence. More than 50 per cent suffered bad health, more than a third had hypertension, and 27 per cent liver diseases. No, these ailments were not caused by struggling to oust capitalist roaders or the strain of taking great leaps forward. They were the outcome of the good life, of banquets that wind their slow path through dozens of courses, pausing after each only to raise a glass in fraternal fellowship with a resounding bellow of "Gambei!" Honour decrees it's bottoms up each time. Chinese officials do worry, but only about the aftermath. When the ma-baap state withered away, retirement became a frightening prospect. Nine out of 10 Chinese are concerned about making ends meet when the public can't any longer dip into public funds: they have squirreled away an awesome $2 trillion for the rainy day. Where did the money come from? That would be asking.

Savings might have been even higher hadn't it been for the old cherchez la femme problem. It was officially announced recently that China's finance minister, Jin Renqing, who was doing so roaringly well that foreign currency reserves surged past the $1.3 bn mark last year, quit for "personal reasons." China watchers suggest nothing could be more personal than a cheongsam or two tucked away.

In another cause celebre, Duan Yihe, the former party chief of Jinan, capital of Shangdong province, was executed for blowing up his young mistress with a car bomb. The stated reason for this grisly murder seems more pertinent than the gruesome act: Duan was tired of being badgered for more and more money.

Such instances can be multiplied. It's the overall lesson that would have horrified Greta Garbo's austere Ninotchka in MGM's eponymous 1939 film. Apparently, 90 per cent of the most senior Chinese officials to be ousted for corruption kept numerous mistresses. Some may have felt proud to let a hundred flowers bloom like the Great Helmsman; for others the women were snob accessories like the Black Cat escorts some Indian dignitaries flaunt.

Madame Sun Yat Sen wrote in 1911 of the influence of foreign-educated students. Deng predicted they would transform China. But neither could have known that returning students would bring back the killjoy West's middle class morality. The Personnel Ministry fiat sounds the death knell of both historical indulgence and Mao's ideological licence. In an unheralded clash of civilisations, Communism is succumbing to Protestantism's puritanical ethic.