06 Dec 2012
A Chinese police chief who kept two sisters as his mistresses has become the fifth government official in six days to be embroiled in a sex scandal.
Qi Fang, the head of the police force in Wusu, a city of 200,000 people in the far Western region of Xinjiang, is under investigation for employing the sisters in his police force.
One sister was promoted to be the vice captain of the special operations squad while the other worked as an assistant police officer in the traffic department.
The Beijing News, a state-run newspaper, said the sisters had previously worked in a dance troupe and claimed they may even be twins.
Mr Qi's exposure is the latest in string of stories this week, all in state-run newspapers, about badly behaved officials.
Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, tweeted that "one or two" stories are coming out each day and that "so many bureaucrats seem to be following exactly the same path to corruption".
Some observers suggested that China's new leaders had sanctioned the reports to send a warning shot out to officials.
"The ability of the internet [to uncover scandals] is greater than ever before and the new government cares more about corruption and is acting very quickly," said Mao Shoulong, a professor of Chinese politics at Renmin university.
On Wednesday, it emerged that the 43-year-old head of a small village in Shanxi province had four wives and ten children, a detail that came to light after he was arrested for plotting an assault.
At the start of the week, a television presenter accused a local official in Heilongjiang province of coercing her into an affair for years and raping her while she was seven-months pregnant. The official has now been fired.
In Shandong province, the deputy head of the local agriculture bureau saw evidence of his philandering posted online, including signed letters promising to divorce his wife for his lover.
Finally, in Chongqing, a local government official was fired after he was seduced into a honey trap by property developers.
A leaked notice from China's propaganda officials instructed newspapers to "strictly adhere to information issued by authoritative departments" when reporting on officials who "have become degenerate", according to the China Digital Times website at the University of California, Berkeley.
"Do not investigate or report of your own accord. Do not quote from online sources," the notice added, suggesting that the Communist party is tightly managing the flow of stories so it does not become a flood.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ ... ls-in-six-days.html
