Mistress-dispelling is a booming business in China

When Wang, a 39-year-old woman from Shanghai, discovered texts on her husband’s phone that suggested he was having an affair with one of his employees, she was distraught but decided to take action.

She searched online for a “mistress dispeller.”

Mistress-dispelling services, increasingly common in China’s larger cities, specialize in ending affairs between married men and their extramarital lovers.

Typically hired by a scorned wife, they coach women on how to save their marriages, while inducing the mistress to disappear. For a fee that can start in the tens of thousands of dollars, they will subtly infiltrate the mistress’s life, winning her friendship and trust in an attempt to break up the affair. The services have emerged as China’s economy has opened up in recent decades, and as extramarital affairs grew more common.

With greater opportunities and incentives to be unfaithful new businesses to combat the cheating have apparently flourished.

Counselling, persuasion

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. After her own search, Ms. Wang decided to hire Weiqing International Marriage Hospital Emotion Clinic Group, a mistress-dispelling service in Shanghai.

Weiqing eventually ended the affair, she said, by persuading the other woman to take a higher-paying job in another city.

Weiqing said it started helping clients like Wang in 2001 in Shanghai, and has since expanded to 59 cities.

Mistress dispelling typically begins with research on the targeted woman, said Shu Xin, Weiqing’s director. An investigation team — often including a psychotherapist and, to keep on the safe side, a lawyer — analyses her family, friends, education and job before sending in an employee whom Weiqing calls a counsellor.

The counsellor might move into the mistress’s apartment building or start working out at her gym, getting to know her, becoming her confidante and eventually turning her feelings against her partner.

Kang Na, who runs a mistress-dispelling service called the Reunion Co. in the southern city of Shenzhen, said counsellors are chosen for their attractive looks and personality. While the counsellor goes to work, the mistress-dispelling service advises the wife on how to make herself more attractive to her husband. The companies say it typically takes about three months to dispel a mistress. Yu Feng, director of the Chongqing Jialijiawai Marriage and Family Service Center, said his team has dispelled 260 mistresses in the last two years.