Zhong Yang was sexually addicted. The news that this governor of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ended up in prison for accepting millions of euros in bribes has almost become a side note. Part of the public is more interested in her private life. In China, there are many corrupt officials, but until now, none had such a public history of sexual relationships that surpassed the filters that dominate the cyberspace of the Asian giant. The censors could not - or did not want to this time - stop the tsunami of posts and comments about Mrs. Zhong's collection of lovers.
Let's start from the beginning, April 2023, when the authorities of Guizhou, a province in the Southwest, opened an investigation against a rising female official.
Zhong, 52, was the governor of Qiannan, one of the poorest regions in Guizhou. With a degree in History, at 20 she joined the CCP and began to hold significant positions at the provincial level in the party. She worked as a county magistrate - a court dealing with disputes in rural areas - and led work committees, launching ambitious agricultural programs that boosted economic development in very poor villages.
The success of these initiatives was a stepping stone to higher positions. In 2019, she was sent to Qiannan as the party's deputy secretary and later appointed governor. Her growing popularity even led her to travel to Beijing in 2021 and 2022 as a delegate to the National People's Congress (NPC), the annual meeting of the Chinese Parliament, where she presented several proposals to improve care for the elderly living in the most remote villages.
Zhong was removed from office after it became public that the provincial government was investigating her for corruption. No further details were disclosed until a state television channel aired a documentary exposing various scandals involving party officials. One episode focused on Zhong's downfall: she had accepted nearly 60 million yuan (7.5 million euros) in bribes. She used her position of power to favor companies that paid her illegal commissions with public contracts.
Zhong has just been sentenced to 13 years in prison for corruption. But what has really caught the attention of many Chinese newspapers and social media users is a section of the statement from the Guizhou authorities detailing the "misconduct" of the governor, a single woman with no children, for having had sexual relations with "58 subordinates".
According to several reports from local media, citing sources from the investigation against Zhong, the woman met many of her lovers in nightclubs in the province. She also had intimate encounters with officials from other regions of the country, whom she frequently visited, justifying the trips as "business trips."
One of her lovers, in an interview with a local newspaper, stated that Zhong was "sexually addicted" and that both he and other officials from Qiannan and Guizhou ended up having relations with her out of fear of losing their jobs.