A senior Chinese parliamentarian who blew up his young mistress to silence her demands for money and marriage was executed yesterday, along with his policeman nephew, who helped him to murder the woman.

Duan Yihe, 61, was the latest victim of a crackdown on Communist officials’ corruption and extramarital affairs. Last week the Finance Minister, Jin Renqing, was demoted to a post in a government think-tank amid rumours of a sex scandal.

Mr Duan was a former chairman of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress, or parliament, of Jinan, the capital of eastern Shandong province. He had admitted asking his nephew, Chen Zhi, a Jinan policeman, to help him to arrange a road accident to eliminate the young woman, Liu Haiping.

Mr Chen and the head of a car repair shop planted explosives in Miss Liu’s car. They detonated the bomb by remote control as she drove down a busy road in Jinan on July 9. The blast was so powerful that her Honda sedan was ripped apart, her lower body was destroyed and her torso landed 30 metres away. Two bystanders were injured.

Bombings are so rare in China that the Ministry of Public Security in Bei-jing sent a special team to Jinan. They found Mr Duan’s number on the dead woman’s mobile telephone and it led them to investigate his involvement.

Mr Duan had risen through the local offices of the Communist Party’s organisational departments and encountered Miss Liu in 1994 when she was working as a waitress at a government guest house. He took the divorced woman — about 30 years his junior — as his mistress in 2000 and gave her money to buy two cars and four apartments, one in a smart district of Jinan that she bought in the name of her mother.

The rising party cadre also arranged a job for her in the Jinan Financial Bureau and then the city Bureau of Land and Resources. Her two sisters also obtained higher-paying jobs.

But as the years passed, Miss Liu’s demands for money and marriage began to grate with her benefactor. He tried to split up with her.

Some reports said that she obtained evidence linking him to illegal income and may have been blackmailing him. His conviction said that he had taken bribes and asked for as much as 1.69 million yuan (£120,000), and that he had been unable to explain another 1.3 million in assets — well beyond his income level.

Mr Duan told police he had not intended to kill his mistress, but only to arrange an accident so that she would “lose her ability to think”.

So prevalent is the keeping of mistresses in China that investigators have found that 90 per cent of the most senior officials brought down by corruption in recent years kept them.

A report this week by the top prosecutor’s office said that of 16 provincial-level officials punished for serious graft in the last five years, most had traded power for sex, along with gambling, money laundering and shady land deals with developers.

Chinese state media did not reveal how Mr Duan was executed, but the country is increasingly using lethal injection, instead of the traditional bullet to the back of the head.

Power corrupts

Finance Minister Jin Renquing, credited widely as an architect of China's economic boom, lost his job last month when it was revealed he had conducted an affair with the secret mistress

Chen Liangyu, chief of the Communist Party in Shanghai, was fired last year for corruption after he was found to have raided government funds

Wang Shouye, Vice-Admiral of the Chinese Navy, was sentenced to death in 2006 for accepting up to £8 million in kickbacks

Liu Jinbao, the head of the Hong Kong branch of the state-owned Bank of China, received a death sentence in 2005 after being convicted of embezzling £1 million

China’s most notorious corruption case involved Lin Longfei, party secretary in Fujian province, who was sentenced to death for corruption after it was discovered he invited all 22 of his mistresses to annual banquets

Sources: Times archives; Britannica Book of the Year 2007

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