A Hong Kong TV station recently reported on complicated sexual scandals and a suicide involving high officials in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province. The news has gone viral on China’s Internet.
Kong Chuizhu, Yunnan Province’s deputy from 2003 to 2014, died on July 12, with the cause of death said to be AIDS. Kong resigned this May due to his illness.
According to a report on Aug. 11 by Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV, an official in Beijing said that Kong died after jumping off a building.
A retired department level official in Yunnan said Kong had attempted suicide twice before, using broken glass to cut himself. Each time he was saved after being sent to the hospital.
After the suicide attempts the public learned of his having AIDS, which had been diagnosed early in 2009, the retired official said.
Phoenix TV reported that Kong had mistresses and an indulgent private life, which caused his AIDS disease. Kong was also said since the 1990s to have frequently gone to shops featuring pornography.
Having mistresses is a common thing among officials in Yunnan, and the disclosure of Kong’s disease scared them.
Kong and two other high-ranking officials each kept three of the same women as mistresses. “They didn’t even know that their mistresses are also mistresses for the other two,” an anonymous source who was Kong’s former Communist Party school classmate told Phoenix.
The classmate said, “Now that Kong is diagnosed with AIDS, their mistresses have to get themselves examined secretly.”
One of three officials involved in these sexual triangles was Shen Peiping, another former deputy governor of Yunnan, who was also Kong’s former secretary. Shen was investigated this March for “severe violations of discipline and law” and suspected of taking bribes and adultery. He was purged from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Aug. 6.
Yunnan’s official news media has been low key in reporting Kong’s death and his disease. No mourning ceremony or memorialization reports have been published about the well-known high official. Instead, a brief, 40-word note appeared on the local newspaper six days later: “Comrade Kong Chuizhu, former deputy director of Yunnan Provincial People’s Congress and deputy party secretary, passed away due to illness in Kunming [Yunnan’s capital] on July 12, 2014.”
An official who was in charge of Kong’s security told Phoenix that Kong once attempted to bribe Li Jiating, former governor of Yunnan, with prostitutes in 1999.
“Kong Chuizhu arranged nearly 20 prostitutes for Li Jiating to pick, and Li was upset and left. We were all shocked then,” the official said.
However, in 2001, Li was himself dismissed and purged from the CCP for taking bribes and adultery with a married woman. Li was sentenced to death with a reprieve the next year, according to the Chinese press.
This series of official scandals has inspired a lot of discussion on the Internet, with many netizens saying that the Chinese officials are too corrupt. “This is just a microcosm of the officialdom,” netizen “Linhai Shanfeng11”1 remarked.
Netizen “Dongbei Zuoluo” commented, “The corruption now is unprecedented!”
