The story is all too familiar: The wife of a high-ranking politician with a taste for expensive jewelry compromises the reputation and position of her powerful husband through her brazen shopping exploits.

An article posted on the Los Angeles Times Web site on Dec. 26 entitled "In Beijing, some bling is unwelcome" told how last month TVBS ran a brief story on how Zhang bought a number of jade artifacts, including a pair of earrings worth US$250,000 from Taiwanese jeweler Yu Chong-da.

Zhang, a career geologist and former vice director of China's national gemstone testing center, is obviously now looking for payback and eager to increase her personal collection of green stuff in return for 15 years of washing the brown stuff out of Wen's Y-fronts (I'm talking about Gobi Desert dust, for those of you with your minds in the gutter).

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