I found two interesting stories today buried deep in the pages of the Shanghai Daily, a newspaper I’m reading due to business travel near China’s financial hub.

The first story is on diamond sales. China’s “diamond jewelry demand topped $2 billion last year,” it said, alluding I imagine to total diamond sales.

In a nation where ostentatious displays of jewelry were not common even a few years ago, this marks quite an explosion. Shanghai’s Diamond Exchange was set up in 2000 and has grown from 41 members to 209 members, the article notes.

The market is growing so quickly that diamond merchants from around the world have decided to hold the World Diamond Congress in Shanghai in May 2008.

In a separate, presumably unrelated, item, a law professor in Beijing is proposing a new category of crime – sexual bribery. This is supposed to combat the prevalent practice among corrupt officials of taking mistresses.

The article says Fang believes that 95 percent of officials exposed as corrupt have taken mistresses, and that obtaining sex for influence may be common. But the criminal code does not penalize this kind of sexual coercion as a crime.

“Fang Peng of the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing argues that party and other moral disciplines are not enough to deter corrupt officials from keeping a mistress,” the article says, so the anti-bribery law should be broadened.

Of course, the problem arises of how to prove an official was seeking sex for influence.

That problem isn’t unique to China.