Thirty-Three Ways to Dispel a Chinese Mistress

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are 33 ways to dispel a mistress according to one of China's top love detectives. An unusual new industry has taken hold in some of the country's top cities. It is called "mistress-dispelling", and it involves hired operatives doing what it takes to separate cheating husbands from their mistresses. With the surge in super-affluent families in China, there has also been an apparent upsurge in the number of men choosing to keep a concubine. And for wives who see divorce as a humiliating option, almost no expense is sometimes spared in seeing off the rival. Ed Butler meets some of these private detectives and "marriage counsellors", heads off on a mistress "stake-out", and asks whether this is all a symptom of a deeper crisis in gender relations in China. Producer: Ed Butler.

(Photo: Asian woman with red lipstick and finger showing hush silence sign, isolated on white background Credit: Shutterstock)

Transcript

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0:00.0	A Chinese civil servant and his mistress are entering a bedroom.
0:08.0	Their meeting recorded on a secret video camera.
0:11.0	The man's wife bursts in without speaking she starts hitting the
0:18.8	mistress. The man tries to stop her, then it all kicks off.
0:26.0	Welcome to assignment on BBC World Service and welcome to the undercover world of the
0:38.0	mistress dispeller fighting back against marital infidelity, Chinese style.
0:44.0	What they do is dispel the mistress and persuade the husband to come back. a mistress is a tumor so the
0:55.0	a mistress is a tumor so the first thing to do is get rid of the tumor
1:00.0	I'm Ed Butler and in today's program I'm going to be looking at this extraordinary new growth industry in China
1:10.4	Mistress Dispelling private detectives hired to separate unfaithful spouses from their lovers.
1:17.0	It's hard to measure precisely, but thousands of wealthy Chinese are now said to be using these services shining a light not just on China's sexual politics
1:28.3	but also on the growing pressures that exist on the marital institution.
1:33.0	Right, well I've just come in off the street and
1:37.0	I'm now at the offices of a place called Wei Ching.
1:40.0	It is, well, it describes itself as the first professional transnational love hospital in China.
1:50.0	I'm going to find out what that is.
1:53.0	Hello!
1:54.0	Hi.
1:55.0	Hello.
1:56.0	Hey, there, there, no,
1:57.0	say you're handsome.
1:59.0	Nice to meet you.
	...

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