Chicken blood and fake auctioneers: The weird ways women in China are getting rid of their husband’s mistress

CHINA’S “mistress hunters” specialise in sabotaging cheating spouses. It’s not a pretty business but somebody has to do it.

Businesses such as the Changzhou Sincere Heart Marriage and Family Consulting company are becoming more and more common, thanks to China’s ‘looser morals’.

THERE are many ways you can deal with a cheating spouse.

You can exact dramatic revenge on their personal property:

That’s really going to decrease the value. Picture: Reddit.

You can name and shame:

Picture: Reddit

Or you can hold your head high and rub salt into the wound:

Take that. Picture: Reddit

But sometimes, the person doesn’t want to cut their cheating good-for-nothing spouse loose. They want the partnership to remain and instead they want the third party to just ... well ... disappear.
And in China, that’s where Zhu Lifei comes in. The 30-year-old entrepreneur runs the extensively named Changzhou Sincere Heart Marriage and Family Consulting company.

He and his team of 23 staff members specialise in sabotaging extramarital relationships by steering lovers away from cheating spouses. And sometimes their methods verge on the bizarre.

Zhu recently gave an interview with the LA Times that gave a unique insight into the world of mistress hunters (or ‘affairs doctors’ or ‘splitting specialists’ as they’re sometimes called.)

Men occasionally request his services, but his clientele is largely female. As he charges the equivalent of $20,000 to $200,000 to “rescue” a marriage, his customer-base are generally wealthy women who are keen to avoid divorce.

Divorce in China can be costly, especially for women. Aside from the social stigma that falls more heavily on women, family property and finances in China tend to be registered in the husband’s name. It’s not uncommon for a divorced woman in China to find herself homeless.

Trouble in China’s marriages ... footage of a woman beating her husband’s mistress in a street in Bozhou, Anhui province went viral in June.

The mistress-dispelling service that Mr Zhu offers has been described as part counsellor, part private investigator. The walls of his offices in the southern city of Changzhou are decorated with counselling accreditation certificates and his team includes psychologists, lawyers, counsellors and beauticians (who endeavour to make the customer more attractive to their spouse). He recently partnered with a law firm next door so the company can better investigate mistresses.

Sometimes Zhu’s methods are unorthodox.

In one instance, after an attempt to confront the lover failed, Zhu’s team covered the wife with chicken blood and damaged her car, faking an accident to gauge the husband’s sympathy.

Disappointingly, he didn’t seem to care much.

Sometimes Zhu uses ‘public relations consultants’ to break up affairs.

Often, once they’ve researched what sort of mistress they are dealing with (is she in it for love, money or sex) they’ll select a “public relations consultant” — aka a fake suitor — to split up the lovers.

The company trains these consultants on luxury brands, wine and Western food: indulgences they believe will entice a mistress away from a straying husband.

One case study where a consultant was used in this manner played out in Hong Kong.

After getting a call from a distressed wife, Mr Zhu and his team researched the mistress and discovered where she was living. They rented an apartment down the hall from her, and planted a man with the fake identity of an “affluent auctioneer” in it.

Meanwhile, stylists gave the wife a new look and she received voice coaching to make her sound more appealing.

Fake loan sharks were sent to the mistress’s door to demand money. The “auctioneer” appeared afterwards with wine to ease her stress. He sent presents to the mistress that the cheating husband would find to arouse suspicion and drive a wedge between them.

They succeeded in putting an end to the affair. As in most cases where public relations consultants are used, the fake auctioneer withdrew from the mistress afterwards with the excuse of family disapproval.

A poster for “Mistress Dispeller,” a Chinese film about a man whose job is to lure women from their married lovers and whose wife fears he’s falling for the mistress he was hired to dispel.

In a different case documented by the NY Times, another mistress was befriended by an employee and persuaded to take a higher-paying job in another city, bringing an end to the affair.

Critics of these affair sabotage agencies accuse them of lacking moral principles and question the legality of their methods.

But Mr Zhu insists his company does not violate anyone’s privacy and employs the law firm to stay within legal bounds.

A traditional marriage counsellor also told The Times that a mistress-dispeller is a Band-Aid solution.

“This kind of service won’t really bring a family back together,” said Liu Weimin, director of the Guangdong Province Marriage and Family Counselors Association.

“These problems need to be solved between the husband and wife.”

Despite the criticisms, members of Mr Zhu’s team say that they are happy with the work they do, and feel that they are achieving something by “helping to repair marriages”.

“We are fighting for justice,” reiterates Mr Zhu. Though he also admits that thanks to their techniques, “people hate us”.

He says he succeeded in 73 per cent of his 362 cases last year and that most interventions tend to last one to six months.

Businesses such as the Changzhou Sincere Heart Marriage and Family Consulting company are becoming more and more common. A search on Baidu, a Chinese search engine, yields pages of ads and blogs that link back to mistress-dispelling companies based in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou.

China is often viewed as a conservative country, but it would seem morals have been loosening lately. At least 95 per cent of the officials detained for corruption in 2012 had mistresses, according to a study by People’s University in Beijing.

China’s divorce rate has also been climbing — it reached 2.8 per 1000 people last year, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, more than triple the rate in 2002.

Some mistress dispellers have begun to expand their operations overseas, mainly serving ethnic Chinese women living abroad. But Kang Na, owner of China’s Reunion Company said he was preparing to start English-language services for non-Chinese clients in Europe and North America by opening a call centre based in the Philippines or Malaysia.

“We began by servicing Chinese,’’ Mr Kang said. “But we’ve discovered in the course of our work that it’s not just our own people who have these problems. Everyone does.”

And in case you were worried about the woman covered in chicken blood whose husband was unmoved by her “car accident,” the mistress later became more aggressive, at one point slapping the wife in an encounter.

So Mr Zhu turned to a “splitting specialist” whose presence demonstrated to the husband how little his lover valued him and how much she enjoyed his money.

Within 13 days, the affair had ended.