Chinese Official With 5 Children Loses His Post

BEIJING — A Chinese bureaucrat who broke the country's single-child regulations not once but four times has become the latest cadre to pay the price for not having devoted enough attention to his mistress.

Qin Huaiwen, head of a local construction bureau in the northern province of Shanxi, was turned in by his lover to the authorities, who discovered that he not only had two children by her but had also fathered three daughters by his wife.

While there are some exceptions to the "single-child" rules, they did not apply in Mr. Qin's situation, and in any case Communist Party members are supposed to set an example.

Mr. Qin's mistress, named by state-run press only as Miss Ma, was not yet 20 when she met him. He was already in his 40s. She told her son and daughter, who she sent away to live with their grandparents, that their father was dead. However, she later became angry at the level of child support provided by Mr. Qin, and she reported him.

The official is the latest of a string of victims to lose their jobs following an anti-corruption campaign. They include a vice-mayor of Beijing, who kept a number of concubines in a luxury villa on the outskirts of the capital.

Another was Wang Shouye, a deputy commander of the Chinese navy, found guilty of taking bribes worth millions of dollars after being exposed by one of his mistresses.