The master primarily wants the second wife to provide him with sex and face. The second wife primarily wants the master to provide her with a luxurious lifestyle. Both sides have an obligation to behave with decorum toward each other in public places, so as to win the respect of other people.

Sometimes the ernai's clothing should be extremely provocative sexually, and sometimes it should be refined and elegant, in order to make other men jealous of the master. The ernai must wear high-class, well-known designer clothing and shoes. She is not permitted to use fake luxury goods.

The ernai will provide the master all varieties of sex. The ernai agrees to have intercourse three times a day, or two hours of enjoyment in bed. Whether they kiss is up to the ernai. No ernai should ever employ any behaviour that would damage a man's self-esteem, such as suggesting he 'does not cut it'.
An online Chinese second-wife 'contract'

At a dinner in Beijing this summer, my old friend Tang brought along a pale wisp of a girl in designer jeans and stiletto heels, whom he introduced as his girlfriend. None of the six of us already seated around a table in Beijing’s stylish Three Guizhou Men restaurant batted a single lash, even though Tang is married with two children – and we all know his wife. Bringing a mistress to dinner in China is not cause for comment, especially in a hip, expensive outfit like this, where patrons have to be rich to afford the food. Our table was covered with gorgeous dishes: translucent noodles draped with spring onions and hot peppers, spicy fish in a ginger broth and racks of tender ribs. Tang’s girlfriend reached her chopsticks out and a small piece of meat slipped off the bone.

I lived in China for six years in the 1990s, and was on a biannual visit there this summer. When I asked Tang’s girlfriend, “What do you do?” I knew it was too direct a question. But I asked it warmly and in Chinese, hoping
not to embarrass but to include her. She didn’t appear to mind.

“She’s a TV hostess,” Tang responded, “very successful.” He put his arm around her, and she smiled in a way that suggested she was both smitten with and amused by Tang.

“Why bother working at all?” one of our male friends joked. “Tang can’t afford an apartment for you?”

“Wouldn’t that make you an ernai?” I asked, hoping for the “foreigner doesn’t get it” forgiveness exclusion. The men all looked at me, horrified. Tang’s girlfriend grinned. “Good Chinese,” she said, as if surprised I knew the word.

But everyone who has ever lived in China knows the expression for “second wife”. And most people know at least one ernai personally. Ernai are a modern version of concubines, as common as colds. They are women kept in luxury apartments and goods by married lovers – mostly overseas businessmen and officials but, increasingly, by men at every level of society. The most successful kept women represent entrepreneurs of a sort, floating in a sink-or-swim economy and providing enticing models for what the new China can offer: genuine Prada stilettos, diamonds, iPods and sprawling villas. They work out in the swankiest health clubs, drive Minis, BMWs and Audis, and carry lapdogs in Gucci handbags. They have role models more glamorous than those of most aspiring careerists: from Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, Madame Jiang Qing, to the actress Gong Li’s gorgeous fourth-wife character in Zhang Yimou’s movie Raise the Red Lantern.

And yet, like women everywhere who trade sex for money, ernai are vulnerable to abuse, unprotected by degrees, careers, or backup plans, and often deserted in their thirties. An increasing number of notable ernai now lead lives complicated by corruption and scandal. They are forbidden by law but flaunted in practice, socially both celebrated and condemned, just as concubines have always been.

In the US, a mistress should be a well-kept secret. In most of Europe, she should be kept with discretion. In China, the keepers of ernai get not only the service but also the face (maintaining face, or an unchallenged public persona, is seen as hugely significant). In a second wife’s lifestyle is a reflection of her master’s capacity to spend. Her beauty is a testament to his taste, her role both public and private.

It was 20 years ago that Deng Xiaoping, the former de-facto leader of the People’s Republic of China, uttered his fabled “to get rich is glorious”; globalisation has since made China’s cities and citizens some of the richest and showiest in the world. Yet most of China’s population remains poor and, as in any country on the fast track to First World status, there have been costs associated with China’s breakneck economic, social and ideological change. The critically widening income gap is one such cost; and like many of globalisation’s side effects, one that puts women in particularly vulnerable positions. Just as China’s citizens are among the world’s poorest and richest, so the women who populate China’s growing sex industry represent the entire spectrum from dazzling opulence to Third World poverty. The country’s curious two-class urban population system denies housing, health and education benefits to migrants, leaving a whole population of women from the countryside limited options for food and shelter. At the same time, millions of Chinese entrepreneurs aspire to be the country’s next millionaire, singers to be its next idol, Chinese beauties to be international movie stars. So it’s no surprise that the sex industry should flaunt the position of pampered second wives as its own glorious pinnacle.