No bars, mistresses, Chinese officials warned

The language of the new morality push, one of countless such campaigns informally under way, is surprisingly bold, often cutting through the bureaucratese to make a clear link between moral lassitude and corruption. One statistic trotted out at a recent speech to bureaucrats: 95 percent of officials investigated for corruption were found to be keeping mistresses.

“It's just not possible to keep a mistress on your salary because maintaining this sort of extravagant lifestyle requires a large amount of cash money,” Qi Peiwen, a party discipline enforcer, told officials in southern China.

“So what do you do if you don't have the money? Naturally, you'll use the power at your disposal to go find some,'' Qi said, according to a transcript carried by state media.

The message was reinforced in a series of speeches at party academies last month by Li Yuanchao. He runs the organization department that controls senior appointments.

Morality drives date back long before the Communist Party seized power in 1949, but the current one seems to stem more from a recognition that rampant corruption threatens to undermine the party's authority and permanently warp the value system of this rapidly developing nation of 1.3 billion people.

Meanwhile, a campaign against pornography, lewd content and advertising for sexual services has bolstered efforts to control potentially subversive content on the Internet.

Authorities recently banned more than 1,400 erotic writings and 20 Web sites, including those that discussed one-night stands, wife-swapping, sexual abuse and violence that”disregarded common decency,” according to the government's General Administration of Press and Publication.

Without fixed definitions of what constitutes indecent material, the drive allows censors virtually unfettered authority to block material, including scads of blogs and personal networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and tumblr.

Not everyone is so willing to comply, however. This year the government has had to drop a heavy-handed attempt to increase Internet censorship by ordering pornography filters to be installed on all computers. It provoked a litany of complaints including that it denied access to much material that could not reasonably be considered offensive.

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