Fixing marriages is a lucrative business for Jiali Jiawa, a consultancy based on Chonqing which has handled about 10,000 cases of broken marriages.
Most of the clients of the company, Inside Home and Outside Home Marriage Consultancy, were initiated by Chinese wives whose husbands have strayed away and are in extramarital affairs with mistresses. The company receives an average of 300 inquiries on its web site daily, said 45-year-old Yu Feng, founder of Jiali Jiawa, reported The South China Morning Post.
Feng is more known as the mistress discourager. He is a psychology graduate who left Jiangsu Province and moved the Shenzhen where he initially started a counselling workshop with a friend. Most of the people who approached him were wives who complained of straying husbands.
Because of the economic progress in China, some men left the provinces to work in the city. And being away from the family took its toll as the husband sought distraction in bars and clubs that eventually led to romantic relationships with other women who became their mistresses. Feng noted that since 2009, there has been a dramatic rise in extramarital affairs with 80 percent of men having mistresses.
The initial work is done by investigators who inquire if the claim made by wives that their husbands have other women is true. Then social workers talk to the mistresses and family members, while counsellors discuss the issue with the couple. But Jiali Jiawa has standards when accepting cases.
These are: the marriage could still be saved, the couple is legally married and the request would come from an aggrieved wife, never from a mistress. Feng charges a per hour consultancy fee of 1,200 to 1,500 yuan, which means cases involving mistresses usually would cost the wife about 100,000 yuan, although most of them are wives of wealthy men.
Feng pointed out that despite public perception of being home wreckers, mistresses are not all bad women. Most and young and impressionable women whom husbands deceive by big promises of a better life.
However, not all aggrieved wives would have a marriage counselor fix their problem. Some of them take the matter in their hands and attack the mistresses on the street which Mirror noted was a dangerous viral trend in 2015. Most of the time, the crowd just watch the spectacle and would not stop the wife from beating the mistress. Some even filmed the beating and posted it on social media sites