Orgy Photos Give More Than a Peek Into Chinese Officials’ Sex Lives

BEIJING — There are some things that are well known about the sex lives of China’s most lascivious male officials.

They have multiple mistresses. They lavish gifts on their favorite partners (think Louis Vuitton handbags). They frequent bathhouses and massage parlors.

This month, another risqué episode was exposed through leaked photographs on the Internet. The more than 100 photographs show three men and two or three women engaging in group sex in a hotel room. The images have been scrutinized by Westerners, too, including by writers for The New Yorker and Gawker.

Online, some people said a couple of the men appeared to be officials in Lujiang County, in Anhui Province. One man, well-fed and with glasses, was said to bear a strong resemblance to the county party chief, Wang Minsheng. Suspicions were heightened when the Lujiang government first asserted that the images had been altered with Photoshop, then said the people in them were not county officials, period. The party chief denied being in the photographs, prompting Global Times, a state-run newspaper, to run an article under the headline, “Naked Guy Is Not Our Party Chief: Local Authority.”

But the contention that the photographs had nothing to do with local officials was undermined by the resignation of Wang Yu (no apparent relation to the other Mr. Wang) as deputy party secretary of the Communist Youth League at Hefei University. He admitted he was one of the three men. His wife, who also participated, resigned from her job as a high school teacher.

The government has declared orgies, formally called “crowd licentiousness,” to be illegal. Two years ago, in a rare invocation of the law, judges handed down a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence to Ma Yaohai, a 53-year-old professor who lived with his mother in Nanjing and found group sex partners in online chat rooms, where he used the handleRoaring Virile Fire.

There is no indication that the people in the Lujiang photographs have been charged with any crime. Pan Suiming, a prominent sexologist at Renmin University, said in an interview that the penalty for group sex can be up to 10 years in prison. His research showed that as many as 5 percent of Chinese adults have had multipartner adventures.

The scandal over the photographs has prompted calls for officials to be more responsible, and denunciations of violations of privacy.

“The responsibilities of officials should place them in the public eye, and this naturally reduces the amount of privacy they have,” Ji Yueyin, an online commentator for Yanzhao Metropolis Daily, said in a group discussion that was published by the newspaper. “I don’t think this is a bad thing.”

Mr. Pan countered in an interview: “The injustice done to the people in the Anhui orgy shows that China still has an outdated attitude toward sexual rights.”

In Lujiang, a man pedaling his rickshaw on Monday, Wang Fugui, was more down to earth: “That’s officials — you have power, you have money; thus you have women.”

The scrutiny of officials’ sex lives intensified after revelations that Liu Zhijun, a disgraced former railways minister, had 18 mistresses, according to state news organizations. Caixin, a respected investigative magazine, published a long article this month that said in February 2011, when security officers arrived to detain Mr. Liu on suspicion of corruption at a five-star hotel in Nanjing, they found him involved with two women. That report soon ran afoul of the censors; separately, another newspaper had a different account of the arrest on Wednesday, with less salacious details.

The question of officials trading on their power for sex has been raised in the Lujiang scandal. One newspaper, 21st Century Business Herald, wrote on its microblog: “The riddle of this case is whether it was a case of fun wife swapping, or whether it was the boss having his way with his employees’ wives.”

Patrick Zuo contributed research from Lujiang County, China, and Adam Century and Mia Li from Beijing.

《纽约时报》：中国官员的淫乱生活

北京——关于中国最淫乱的那些男性官员的私生活，有很多方面已是众人皆知的了。

他们有很多情妇。给宠爱的情妇买礼物，出手相当大方（比如LV手包之类）。他们还经常光顾洗浴中心和按摩房。

这个月，泄漏到网上的一些照片，又曝出了一件性丑闻。根据这100多张照片显示，三个男人和两三个女人在一个宾馆的房间里，聚众淫乱。一些西方人也查看了这些照片，其中包括为《纽约客》(The New Yorker)和Gawker网站写稿的作者。

网上有人说，其中两个男子看上去像是安徽省庐江县的官员。据称，其中一个长相富态、戴着眼镜的男子看上去十分像庐江县委书记王民生。庐江县政府开始时断言，称照片是被处理过的，但后来又说里面的人根本不是该县的官员。这更大大加重了人们的怀疑。庐江县委书记否认照片里的人是自己，官方媒体《环球时报》还就此写了篇文章，题为《地方政府称：裸男不是我们的县委书记》。

然而，合肥大学共青团委副书记汪昱的辞职动摇了当地官员和不雅照无关的说法。汪昱承认自己就是不雅照中三名男子之一。参与淫乱活动的还有他的妻子，一名高中老师，也已经辞职。

政府已规定，淫乱，正式说法为“聚众淫乱”，是非法行为。两年前，法官根据这条极少被适用的法律，判处53岁的大学教授马尧海三年零六个月的有期徒刑。马尧海和母亲同住在南京，他在网上聊天室寻找进行群体性交的伙伴，所用网名为“阳火旺”。

没有迹象表明，庐江不雅照的当事人遭到了任何刑事指控。人民大学的著名性学家潘绥铭在采访中表示，聚众淫乱罪最高可判处10年有期徒刑。而他的研究表明，5%的中国成年人都有过集体性交的经历。

不雅照丑闻爆发后，有人呼吁官员要对自己的行为负责，也有人斥责这是对隐私权的侵犯。

《燕赵都市报》的网络评论员集月音在发表在该报上的一个小组讨论中说：“官员作为手握权力的公职人员，如果做出背离传统道德的事，被人公开质疑应该是可以理解的。”

潘绥铭在采访中驳斥了这种观点：“对安徽聚众淫乱事件的当事人权利的侵犯，表明中国对性权利的态度还是太落后了。”

周一，在庐州蹬三轮车的车夫王富贵说得就更实在了：“那是当官的——你有权，有钱；当然就有女人了。”

在官方媒体机构爆出被罢黜的原铁道部部长刘志军有18名情妇后，对官员私生活的批评开始强烈起来。中国威望颇高的调查性杂志财新传媒《新世纪周刊》就在本月发表了一片长文，称2011年2月，公安人员逮捕涉嫌贪污的刘志军时，他正在南京的一家五星级酒店，和两个女子厮混在一起。该报道很快被屏蔽了；周三，另外一家报纸对逮捕进行了不同版本的报道，其中没有太多淫乱的细节。

庐江不雅照丑闻引出了官员权色交易的问题。《21世纪经济报道》在其微博上写到：“到底是换伴游戏，还是领导对属下的妻子为所欲为，这是本案的谜团。”