Introduction
Shanghai and Prostitution
This chapter traces the history of sex work in Shanghai over four centuries and views the history of prostitution in Shanghai as one part of the story of a changing city in a radically changing China. Of the countries included in this project, China is of particular interest since it represents a case in which prostitution was historically tolerated and regulated legally and socially by a highly centralized state 1 which went through dramatic transformations in the twentieth century, with policies on prostitution shifting just as extremely.
Five Distinct Eras
For the period from 1600 to the present, I have identified five distinct eras of prostitution. The last dynasty, the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which was established in 1644, is the start date, and the first phase covers nearly two centuries of rule by energetic emperors, when the entertainment culture of the previous high Ming became more regulated. The second phase, from 1830 to 1911, covers the period when Shanghai was designated a treaty port by the British after the Opium War (from 1843). During that era, Shanghai’s treaty port development, combined with an influx of economic and political refugees fleeing political uprisings and extreme economic impoverishment, largely reshaped its population, politics, and power balances. During the third period of Republican China (1912–1949), after the fall of the last imperial dynasty, Shanghai was overrun with drugs, prostitutes, gangs, and gambling. Although it was not the political capital (nearby Nanjing had that distinction), it became in this period a cultural capital strongly identified with the Chinese Enlightenment of May 4 1919. Near the end of this period, from 1937 to 1945, Shanghai experienced life as a “lonely island” under Japanese control, with the end of the war bringing civil war and Communist victory, although practically without bloodshed in Shanghai. Next, under Mao and the consolidation of the socialist revolution
Definitions
From early imperial times 4 until the present, prostitution has been addressed in both civil and criminal law and defined generally as “the exchange of sexual services for money or other material recompense”, although the very terms used for it have been much debated. 5 Contemporary sexologist Pan Suiming suggests that, due to widespread official corruption, China has a special form of prostitution today through which sex is traded for privileges. 6 For most of Chinese history, prostitution was not illegal in itself, but activities surrounding it were restricted, particularly trafficking and the disruption of public order. And the main concern has always been to protect “good” women (liangmin) in order to maintain patriarchal family honour and ensure it remained distant from “illicit” sex, which was outside the family and occurred with socially unacceptable partners. 7
Throughout Chinese history, prostitution was loosely monitored by the imperial and/or local state, and it was at times licensed, registered, monitored, and/or taxed. Although there were and are state-wide laws on the books, most administrative regulations were and are still local, with each city and administrative entity having its own variations of categories of prostitutes, affiliated people, and activities that are regulated. And throughout history there have been regular debates about whom to include among their ranks. High-level
Although prostitution was almost exclusively defined in laws as a female phenomenon, there is also an extensive tradition of male prostitution, often linked to actors who almost exclusively serviced other men (see discussion below of other sexualities). But the emphasis throughout Chinese history, especially since the early Qing, on the family as the key social unit and on sex for reproduction, has kept discussions of homosexual prostitution muted. 8
Throughout history, sex work tended to be episodic for many, and that certainly applies to much contemporary prostitution. In fact, many young women exchanging sex for material benefits today would not consider themselves to be prostitutes. Episodic prostitution also includes needy husbands and their families pawning wives, and some scholars suggest that perhaps half of all prostitutes in the past had been pawned. Interviews with poor women today suggest the practice has not disappeared. 9
The Labour Market for Prostitution
Push/Pull Factors and Transformations in Shanghai
To understand the labour market for prostitution in Shanghai, we must first look more closely at the changes in Shanghai over the centuries. It had long been one of a number of “gateway cities”
10
to the rich Yangzi Valley with rich agricultural and manufacturing potential, albeit with more commercial than
Over time, these factors together reshaped the population and thus the customers for its entertainment quarters. Capitalist development also produced people with great wealth who could afford more public displays of consumption, which often included multiple wives and visits to courtesans.
The key turning point came in the mid-nineteenth century with a huge influx of Chinese from the hinterlands fleeing political and economic turmoil, especially the calamitous Taiping civil war (1851–64) followed by the Small Swords Uprising (Xiaodao) that occupied Shanghai from 1853 to 1855 and forced many people, including the Jiangnan elite, to move to Shanghai and its protective foreign enclaves.
14
Aggressive foreigners whose imperialist policies created political, economic, and social turmoil as well as international rivalries for empire exacerbated these upheavals from 1846 to 1853.
15
These dislocations led to more needy women becoming sex workers and to more men of all
Trafficking in girls and women was endemic in twentieth-century Republican China, as it had been throughout Chinese history, with females available among the poorest strata everywhere, particularly in the increasingly impoverished countryside. Recruiters in Shanghai were either local abductors, transporters who located and conveyed women back from the hinterlands usually from regions suffering from famine or other catastrophes, or they were local brokers, called “white ants” who were often themselves women. 17 Girls and women of all ages were pulled into what Matthew Sommers calls “the pervasive market for women’s sexual and reproductive labor”, 18 often with some degree of choice but parents or husbands making economic decisions for the women themselves, calculating their (often dire) options. Gail Hershatter argues that sex work as a choice, involving some kind of economic calculation, was perhaps more prevalent than coercion, given the continued contact between most prostitutes and their families. 19
By the twentieth century, Shanghai was a booming entrepot for both products from the interior leaving its port and for the manufacture and sale of many goods, particularly textiles. By the 1920s its factories had been modernized and predominately employed women.
20
Warlord violence in the 1920s and Japanese control from 1937 to 1945 meant there was a constant influx of migrants and refugees into Shanghai, resulting in crowded conditions and fierce competition for work that left many women vulnerable to prostitution. Not all women in Shanghai could find other employment, and job security was
Distinct about Shanghai (and China more generally) are the swings of political fortunes and their implications for women and prostitution. During the Maoist period, prostitution was linked to the imperial and “feudal” past, and it was harshly punished and forcefully condemned. After a period of strong repression, it was claimed that prostitution had been totally eradicated by 1958. 22 Banned sexual practices therefore took place furtively, with almost nothing written about them except for some mention in literature and films. 23
Since 1978, the migration of large numbers of young male (and female) workers to Shanghai from the countryside has contributed to a booming commercial sex industry. Under Mao a rigidly enforced new residential registration system (hukou) tied the entire population to fixed places of residency, but this system has been considerably relaxed since 1978, creating a mobile national labour force,
24
and there are perhaps 150 million migrants in China today.
25
Migration results in men and women being more tenuously attached to traditional families and social norms, and their greater freedom in sexual activities is literally remaking social mores. Both male migrants and local males take advantage of available, vulnerable young women, sometimes involving
While migrant men are bound to their original homes, returning frequently to take care of farmlands or filial duties, more and more migrant women, since they are fated to be removed from their families anyway, are choosing to stay in these new work places so they can enjoy the greater freedom available to them in both work and marriage (even though they will always be regarded as outsiders). 27 Not finding other suitable work and/or marriage, some migrant women choose prostitution, fall victim to deceit, 28 or are pressed by their bosses to offer sexual services to attract customers. 29 Hostessing seems to be preferable for some to labour intensive industries that offer meagre wages in often exploitative, dead-end jobs, 30 but living “the life” is doubly hard for poor women migrants who face tremendous amounts of discrimination as rural women workers. 31
Not all prostitution today in Shanghai is the result of traffickers, an excess of men, or wretched poverty. By the 1980s Reform Era, when the economy opened up and prostitution reappeared in most Chinese cities, new economic motivations for sex work emerged. The general consumer ethos of the period combined with the relatively easy access to call girls, taxi dancers, masseuses, and karaoke bar workers for men, and the availability of these jobs for women, means that shop girls or women in sweatshop jobs can aspire to buy urban fashions, jewellery, and apartments that their meagre incomes would not ordinarily allow.
32
Prostitution draws on all manner of women in China today, from
Social Profiles
The best introduction to the social profiles of prostitutes is to look at legal/customary categories, both traditional and contemporary.
35
Pre-1949 Shanghai had its own legal and popularly accepted hierarchy,
36
with at least four and sometimes as many as six categories.
37
The seven categories used in China today in fact come from standard Shanghai police usage.
38
The top category, loosely and controversially linked to prostitution and whose disappearance was mourned in the late nineteenth century, were high-class courtesans, often called “storytellers”, who prided themselves on being entertainers with musical, poetic, dramatic, and dance skills, not sex, to share.
39
These women were
Today the quasi-official categories used by the police and public alike number approximately seven. The most elite companion is a new-style concubine or second wife serving one client alone, although now kept not on the family estate but in a separate apartment, with regular, usually monthly, payments. The second category, contracted wives, have less security and their length of service is not assured but they are “packaged”, essentially rented short-term for business trips or official events. The third category includes escort girls and ktv (karaoke) hostesses, bar girls who may but are not required to have sex, available instead primarily as companions for men while they eat and drink at bars, restaurants, and dance halls. They are sometimes called “three accompaniment girls” because they offer the three services of drinking, dancing, and singing. There are many of these in Shanghai. The fourth category are “ding dong girls” who call men in their hotel rooms and invite them out. The fifth are also ubiquitous in China today, “massage parlour” or “hair salon” girls who provide services like massages, haircuts or hairstyling, or sauna visits along with sex, usually inside an establishment, not outside (unless their services are provided on the street, which does happen). The sixth category of prostitutes, street walkers, solicit their customers from bars or hotels, sometimes for fondling in movie houses, and, as is general in China, they work without pimps. The last are literally at the bottom of society, “women who live in a shed” who service the poorest men, usually migrant workers, sometimes living with or among them, exchanging sex for food, shelter, and basic survival. 48
There is some dispute about the common belief that prostitutes, their houses, and their clients shared the same regional, class, or ethnic backgrounds.
The situation today, however, reflects new patterns of migration which respond to the burgeoning growth of China in the world economy and the voracious need for female labour. In 1920, an estimated 82 per cent of Shanghai’s population were migrants, primarily from close-by areas. It is estimated that today about 25 per cent of the population in major Chinese cities is “floating” away from their official hometowns, with migrants traveling to work on the eastern seaboard today from further afield, particularly from the poor and overpopulated provinces of Sichuan, Hunan, and Guizhou. Today most seem to have accompanied or “followed” earlier migrants from their region, district, town, or village. 51
In the past, women’s social background, educational level, and general health declined down the ranks in the hierarchy of sex workers. Age was often inverse; women at the bottom were older, with many former higher-class
Other Kinds of Sex Work
Child Prostitution
There were always children in brothels, the daughters of prostitutes plus young girls procured to be trained and brought up as entertainers, as well as girls doing any manner of work. Customers preferred sex with young girls; brothels demanded higher fees for virgins, with special initiation ceremonies in better establishments. There is still a preference across China for young sex workers, and that has been reinforced since the appearance of aids as there is common belief that young girls are freer of disease. There is some implication that the
Male Homosexual Prostitution
Male homosexual prostitution was quite common throughout Chinese history and is a major theme in literature and art. Male entertainers, especially those who played female roles (dan) in opera, were the most sought after, and in the early twentieth century, popular female impersonators in Shanghai like Mei Langfang attracted particularly wealthy benefactors.
58
In the 1920s and ‘30s, however, both homosexuality and prostitution were labelled deviant and criminal, resulting in their prohibition and then total suppression under Mao. Today, male prostitution has resurfaced and is particularly visible in Shanghai, an international destination for gay men (and women), even though homosexuality has been strongly suppressed by the socialist state and was labelled “hooliganism” (liumang) in the 1979 legal code. Newspapers frequently run exposes of young men who turn to prostitution for quick money, as in a spate of stories in 2011 and 2012 about a high school male prostitution ring in Shanghai.
59
A 2011 national survey of prostitutes which included Shanghai found that over a third of their respondents were male, almost all between the ages of 20 and 30; they are called “money boys” and primarily work at clubs or rental houses. They are often migrants, and there is great demand for their services, but their lives are unstable, marked by frequent moves—they are constantly harassed and their customers seem to want greater variety—and a very high incidence of venereal diseases and aids.
60
Transgender Sex Workers
A new category among Shanghai sex workers includes those who are transgendered or ambiguously gendered and who argue for its long history in China, but as yet there is little mention of it in studies of prostitution. According to a few surveys, transgender sex workers are perhaps the worst treated, with high levels of violence, disease, and psychological problems with trauma and identity issues (one respondent in the survey called people like himself “evil spirits”.) 61
Changing Working Conditions
Working conditions for prostitutes in Shanghai have always varied greatly, depending on the prostitute’s class and clientele, and that is still the case. Like modern day mistresses, in the past the most sought-after courtesans would attend to only one or two clients a night, usually of her own choosing, and they would respect the elaborate rules that governed her art; she would entertain them at elegant teahouses, restaurants, and hotels attended by her large retinue, while, at the other end of the spectrum, the lowest level of prostitute would be pressed to service dozens of men a day in an unsanitary brothel. Those in the middle were available for sex, not entertainment, and they had to accept all who came to them; they were probably in debt to their madams, who also often used drug addiction as a means of control. Like the streetwalkers in China today, they were increasingly desperate for customers and money to survive (and in many cases, gave most of what they made to their families). 62
Violence seems always to have been an occupational hazard at all levels of sex work, both at brothels at the hands of harsh madams and customers or the public at large, as well as the state (police in particular), and it is an issue now as much as it was in the past. Fear of violence and mistreatment by both clients and managers have always been the major reasons prostitutes try to escape the life. 63
Prostitute/Employer/Client Relationships
Most traditional prostitution was carried out at registered brothels or other establishments run by madams who were often retired prostitutes and staffed mostly by female servants for cleaning, makeup, sewing, and foot care, plus teachers of dance and music. Many writers commented on the fictive kin relationships that existed at such establishments, where madams were addressed as “mother”, older women as “aunts”, and other prostitutes as “sisters.” 70 It appears that the language of family in such relationships persists today; sex workers often call their madam “mother” and even male managers are referred to as “mamasan” in ethnographies of the world of male prostitutes. 71 Although the Chinese system did not and still does not include pimps as in the west, in the multiple new venues for sex services like clubs and bars there is an increasing need for managers who not only supervise but also protect and control the working girls (and boys). The relationship, particularly when sex workers are not able to “go out”, verges on enslavement.
Interactions with courtesans required an elaborate code of conduct, and only men who were cognizant of its intricate rules were allowed to participate (novices and “country bumpkins” were the subject of much ridicule in this regard in novels and films). Elaborate rules and customs continue to be part of prostitutes’ lives, as in the description in contemporary ethnographies of karaoke and dance hall girls today, 72 along with popular films, novels, and blogs (like Shanghai Baby). The game involves getting as much from clients as possible without giving up their freedom, or much sex. But there is as wide a range of prostitute/employer/client relationships as there are multiple arrangements at all levels.
Prostitutes’ Agency and Resistance
Certainly courtesans and entertainers at the top of their profession had a great deal more freedom than the “good” women cloistered in their homes. Feminists
Likewise, there have been many debates about the notion of resistance. There have been cases of prostitutes protesting in groups, most famously in Shanghai in 1920, a time of mass strikes, when sing-song girls demonstrated on the streets to protest new laws that categorized them as prostitutes; their banners read, “We sell our smiles, not our bodies.”
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There are also celebrated stories of prostitutes joining together in the twentieth century to show their patriotism, especially the (most likely) apocryphal story of prostitutes in nearby Nanjing offering their own bodies to save “good” women from rampaging Japanese troops in 1937.
75
Today, there are scattered instances of prostitutes and their advocates using international human rights appeals and legal language, such as the well-known feminist activist Ye Haiyan, known as Liumang Yan or “Hooligan Sparrow”, who has taken the fight for prostitutes’ rights to the internet. In Shanghai, an advocacy group for male prostitutes, Shanghai Leiyi
Prostitutes’ Culture
As entertainers traditionally linked to the world of literate scholar-officials, Shanghai prostitutes, particularly higher level courtesans, were associated with elite culture, singing and playing classical songs especially on the pipa (Chinese lute), acting out scenes from traditional opera, dancing, reciting poetry, and other social skills such as serving tea and playing elaborate drinking games with classical allusions. Courtesans were known for their trend-setting elaborate fashion. 77 By the late nineteenth century, the formless traditional women’s tunic was transformed into the sexy chipao (cheong sam) by tailoring it tighter with a high side slit, and it became identified with the “sing-song girls” now included as part of the new “courtesan” world. 78 Courtesans’ elaborate makeup, jewellery, hairdos, accessories, and foot-binding shoes were all were closely watched and copied. Their exploits, romances, intrigues, and petty fights were followed in the tabloid press and formed the substance of a distinct courtesan novel genre. Visiting courtesans in their dazzlingly beautiful establishments, engaging them for formal banquets in restaurants and teahouses, and trying to become a favoured client were all part of elaborate rituals of which the courtesans were masters and ostensibly in control. 79
Prostitutes’ culture today is perhaps even more varied, with high-class call girls living in extreme luxury. Sex work is now viewed by many women as an easy way to earn money, participate in contemporary fashion, and be modern and fashionable, and this is accompanied by a disdain of regular employment on farms, at factories and in shops. On the other hand, there are perhaps millions of women, many of them poor older migrants or unemployed older women living in abominable conditions, who service the old, the very poor, and the criminal in so-called “ten yuan” (us$2) brothels. 82 Prostitution is a popular topic in newspapers, journals, on television, in movies, in advice columns, on the internet, and in literature, with regular scandals that involve corrupt officials either as purchasers of sexual services or having been tolerant of and perhaps profiting from sex work. 83
State, Society, and Prostitution
Scholars such as Susan Mann have convincingly argued that prostitution should be understood not just as entertainment or as a means to survival but, more importantly, within the context of arranged marriage in a highly patriarchal society which has resulted in male prerogatives in social and sexual conduct both inside and outside the home and in the need to protect (their)
Though prostitution was legal before 1949, there were always contradictions; the state used extensive means to limit and control prostitution and it was powerfully condemned in popular morality, with a major distinction between liangmin (good people) and jianmin (base people) who had to be kept separate and distinct. Due to heavy doses of Confucian morality and Daoist ideas about the body, 84 men were pressured to stay loyal to their families and not take risks, whether moral, legal, or medical.
Before 1949 there was a tradition of state oversight of prostitution so that it could regulate prostitution (and profit from it), promote public health, and maintain public order. State and society acknowledged that prostitutes played a necessary role, but also recognized that their presence was quite dangerous, so they had to be specially monitored, regulated, and controlled. 85 Often part of the underworld with its gangsters and brotherhoods, prostitution was thus connected with opium, alcohol, stolen goods, and other criminal activities.
Prostitution had long been addressed in state and local legal codes and regulations, both criminal and civil, which traditionally had not expressly prohibited prostitution but regulated and limited it, with status differences as an integral part of the law.
86
Although law codes underwent much revision and clarification under the Republican and prc regimes, it has often been remarked that many of the traditional Confucian assumptions that undergirded imperial law about prostitution and sexuality remained and are still dominant in China today; these notions include the idea that people are innately good and educable, with the family being the key socializing unit rather than the
During the Republican period (1911–1949), law codes were updated and made more “modern”, and the 1923 Provisional Law Code prohibiting procuring and trafficking was revised in 1935 to make it a crime to take anyone younger than 20 years of age from his/her family, particularly if the aim were “carnal knowledge or [intent] to do a lascivious act.” 88 The endless succession of court cases, as in the Qing, attests not only to the control of the state, but also to the awareness by ordinary Chinese subjects and citizens of their right to legal protection.
Faced with a burgeoning prostitution problem and powerfully influenced by western attitudes about women’s status, the treatment of social problems, public health concerns, and sexuality, late nineteenth-century reformers linked prostitution to China’s backwardness, and twentieth-century May 4th Enlightenment thinkers called for a strong, modern state. They both argued that prostitution should be closely regulated, with some even arguing for its abolition, as had been done in England and the United States.
89
Prostitution was thus more tightly regulated by all of the Shanghai governments until 1949 through licensing and taxation (via a five-class system). Extensive registries of both brothels and prostitutes were kept as part of a significant source of municipal income,
90
and weekly health examinations were made mandatory in the International Settlement in 1877.
91
Shanghai, like other cities, also
After 1949, the strong popularly supported Maoist state that governed all of China focused on the complete eradication of prostitution (along with the sale and use of opium) as a major symbol of capitalist vice. Banned in Shanghai in 1951, prostitution was deemed to have been eliminated in 1958; it was claimed that venereal disease clinics were no longer necessary and they were shut down in 1965. 93 The state claimed that it had enacted total abolition, although there were scattered stories from 1950 until 1980 of poor women resorting to prostitution, officials having access to sexual services from various kinds of women (for example, drama troupes consisting of women with “bad” class backgrounds), and guest houses that offered sexual services for special foreign visitors. 94
Prostitution reappeared with a vengeance in the early 1980s under Deng Xiaoping’s reform economy which permitted private entrepreneurship along with increasing geographic mobility and the development of market socialism
Although prostitution is formally illegal in the prc, its forceful reappearance in the 1980s has led to a spate of regulations attempting to limit and control this new phenomenon. 96 Government at all levels has attempted to rein in prostitution, but, as has already been noted, due to a general culture of corruption, officials at all levels are often implicated in prostitution. Both national and local “strike hard” (yan da) campaigns against illegal activities that include sex work, gambling, drug use, and trafficking are waged regularly with great drama and visibility but with unclear results. 97
Attitudes toward sexuality in general and particularly about men’s use of sexual services seem to be undergoing major transformations. Men’s attitudes have changed dramatically, from the traditional concern over saving one’s male yang and imbibing as much female yin as possible to a general acceptance today of frequent sex and sex services. In a 2006 national survey, 7.2 per cent of urban males and 1.8 per cent of rural men reported that they purchase sexual services. 100 Women’s attitudes have changed as well, particularly among young women, as a result of the One Child Policy; ironically, it has shifted the focus on sex for procreation to sex for pleasure.
At the end of her recent book on karaoke bar hostesses, anthropologist Zheng Tiantian returned to visit the women she came to know. Business had been sluggish, but instead of redefining the audience to include families, as in Japan, karaoke bar owners in China instead began offering naked hostesses who sang, danced, and touched customers’ genitals “to see their reactions”, a change that was so popular that there were hour-long lines outside the bars. Lamenting this increasingly demeaning work for what she calls the new “entrepreneurial man” in China, Zheng closes with the conclusion—an apt conclusion for this paper—that “the demand for naked hostesses is a long way from the scholar’s relationship with the courtesan in classical China.” 103
In the footnotes, Chinese names are rendered in the western fashion with personal name first and family name last but in the text the traditional Chinese style is maintained.
There has been interest in and concern about prostitution throughout Chinese history, and it has long been a subject of literature, drama, and poetry as well as law, with wide-ranging sources, especially since the boom in printing in the late sixteenth century and subsequent rise of vernacular fiction that allowed for much more nuanced and full descriptions of gender models and sexual mores. Giovanni Vitiello, Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China (Chicago, 2011), pp. 4–5. Another category mined by social historians has been unofficial histories (yeshi) which were touted by late Qing reformers as the most useful way to educate the public “to save the nation with fiction.” Quoted in Madeleine Yue Dong, “Unofficial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Chinese Republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian”, in Beata Goodman and Wendy Larson (eds), Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial China (Lanham, 2005), pp. 169–188, 184f1. For Shanghai, good sources exist from the Qing Dynasty, including literary works and official gazetteers, imperial reign histories, law codes, and court documents. See the discussion in Linda C. Johnson, Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port 1074–1857 (Stanford, 1995), pp. 17–18, 403. For the period covered in this chapter, the increasing variety of sources include administration and police records about social control as well as medical records tracking health concerns, with perhaps the most useful popular guidebooks and travellers’ accounts, both Chinese and foreign. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century China (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 14–17; Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History 1849–1949 (trans. Noel Castelino) (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 69–70. By the nineteenth century, sensational stories about prostitutes appeared frequently in popular newspapers and modern periodicals like Shenbao that boomed during this period plus literary sources that include novels, modern plays, cabaret, and film. There is much recent work on prostitution (and sex in general) by sociologists, anthropologists, and students of law and criminal justice. Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge, 2011); Ruan Fangfu, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture (New York, 1991); Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (New York, 1997); Min Liu, Migration, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking: the Voice of Chinese Women (New Brunswick, 2011); and Tiantian Zheng, Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Post-Socialist China (Minneapolis, 2009). Prostitution and sexuality are also increasingly popular topics for social historians, many of whom maintain feminist approaches to sex work. See Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures; Evans, Women and Sexuality; Elaine Jeffreys (ed.), Sex and Sexuality in China (London, 2006). Yet historians of women and sexuality still decry the lack of attention in the official record given to prostitution and have to ferret out data from disparate sources; see Ruan, Sex in China; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality. Although it has long been standard in China to explain prostitution on economic grounds, relatively few studies of prostitution regard it primarily as a labour issue, including those looking at labour migration. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 388–392, identifies sexologist Pan Suiming as the closest to offering a labour-market analysis. Lastly, the lack of writing and research on prostitution reflects the voice of the prostitute herself—and occasionally himself. Travis S.K. Kong, Chinese Male Sexualities: Memba, Tongzhi, and Golden Boy (New York, 2010); Kam Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinities: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge, 2002), although there is a long tradition of writers conveying the voice of the girl gone astray. Today, with more openness both in public and in academia, a growing number of anthropologists, sociologists, sexologists, and photographers are transcribing the stories and documenting the lives of sex workers up close. Zheng, Red Lights; Liu, Migration; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 3–4.
At its height during the Tang and Sung Dynasties, government-run brothels included both those under local officials and the imperial government. Prostitutes were included in China’s hereditary outcast system along with other rootless people such as actors, barbers, transport workers, and exiled prisoners. Early Qing emperors ended the government-run brothel system and formally abolished hereditary categories, putting in place greater systems of control for the entire population. See Shunu Wang, Zhongguo Changji Shi [A History of Prostitution in China] (Beijing, 1934).
Johnson, Shanghai, Ch. 4.
By convention, since 73 b.c. during the great Han Dynasty. Ruan, Sex in China, p. 69; Matthew Sommers, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2000).
For insights into this debate, see Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 329; Elaine Jeffreys, “Feminist Prostitution Debates: Are There any Sex Workers in China?” in Ann E McLaren (ed.), Chinese Women: Living and Working (London, 2004), pp. 83–105, 98. In pre-1949 Chinese, the general term used for prostitute (which is still common) was jinu. Only recently has the government used the term maiyin funu (woman who sells sex), while feminists and international ngos increasingly use terms like xing gongzhe, a direct translation of “worker in sex trades”. See China Sex Work Organization Network Forum “Research on the Impact of 2010 Crackdown on Sex Work and hiv Intervention in China” (Shanghai, 2011), p. 3.
Suming Pan, “Jinchang: Wei shui fuwu?” [“The Prohibition of Prostitution: Whom does it Serve?”] in Aizibing: shehui, lunli, he falu wenti zhuanjia yantaohui [Report on the Expert Workshop on hiv and Prostitution: Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues] (Beijing, 1996), pp. 19–21, 20–21.
Mann, Gender and Sexuality, Ch. 1.
Susan Mann argues there was an inherent contradiction in state policy with homosexuality continuing as an elite literati practice yet at the same time criminalized in 1740 and the state backing the family as the key social unit, which it has continued to do since, with sex within marriage the overwhelming ideal. Ibid., pp. 142–158.
Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 197. Matt Sommers argues that polyandry was so widespread, with contractual arrangements and an extensive language for renting out wives for sex work or bringing in another man to work and share the marital bed as “part of a portfolio of strategies that enable a family to get by” (p. 33), that both forms of polyandry should be an integral part of any discussion about marriage in China. “Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China”, in Goodman and Larson, (eds), Gender in Motion, pp. 29–54.
The title of Mary Gamewell’s 1916 book on Shanghai was The Gateway to China: Pictures of Shanghai (New York, 1916; 2012 reprint); Marie Claire Bergere uses the term in her seminal article, “The Other China: Shanghai from 1919–1949”, in Christopher Howe (ed.), Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1–34. It continues to be used into the twenty-first century such as in Edward Denison and Yu Ren Guang’s Building Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway (New York, 2006).
Shanghai was first designated a market town in 1074 and a market city, shi, in 1159, finally reaching the administrative status of a county seat (xian) in 1292 (the lowest political unit in the Chinese state with a magistrate appointed by the central government), with its own xian college in 1294 for aspirants for the civil service examination and posts (Johnson, Shanghai, Ch. 1). Its role as a port in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties vacillated with changing rivers, silting harbours, and, in the Ming era (1388–1644) with prohibitions on maritime trade, was replaced up to the early Qing era by a major cotton revolution in the region. Its success can again be measured in its promotion to higher administrative status; by 1740 it was styled a circuit (dao). These changes had various implications for sex work.
Johnson, Shanghai, p. 58.
Zhang Zhongmin, Shanghai cong kaifa zouxiang kaifang, 1368–1842 [Shanghai from Inception to Opening] (Kunming, 1990), p. 178; Bergere, Other China, p. 24.
Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh (eds), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley, 1993).
A period Johnson calls the “internationalization of Shanghai.” Johnson, Shanghai, Ch. 9.
Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 6.
Bai maiyi. See Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 7.
Sommers, Gender in Motion, p. 51; Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China 1860–1937 (New York, 1984), Ch. 3; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 7.
Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 182.
Marie Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie (Cambridge, 1989); Emily Honig, Sisters and Stranger: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, 1986).
Fred Wakeman described the liminal area of the extra-boundary “Badlands”, the less-patrolled western end of the foreign concessions, where poorer women carried out sex work in a threatening climate of violence and criminality. Frederic Wakeman, Jr, Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime (Cambridge, 1996).
Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, p. 175.
For example, sexual violence against youth “sent down” in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution in 1966–1976. See Guangnai Shan, Zhongguo changji—guoquo he xianzai [Chinese Prostitution Past and Present], (Beijing 1995), p. 3; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 332; see also two films about “sent down” youth during the Cultural Revolution: “Wild Mountain” (Ye shan), and “Xiu: Sent Down Girl”, plus Yuan-Tsung Chen, Dragon’s Village: An Autobiographical Novel about Revolutionary China (New York, 1981) about 1950s land reform and the challenges it faced.
Arianne Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, “Introduction”, in On the Move: Women in Rural to Urban Migration in Contemporary China (New York, 2004), pp. 14–20. For Shanghai’s changing hukou policies, see Ibid., p. 34, 49f, 51f.
Liu, Migration, Prostitution, p. 3, quoting 2007 China Labor Bureau Statistics. According to the recent Chinese press, policies will soon be put into place that further modernize agriculture, releasing between 100–200 million rural residents from agricultural work and moving them to urban residences.
Liu, Migration, Prostitution argues that while there is some trafficking, most migrants move of their own volition and then enter prostitution as the best choice available to them.
Louise Beyon, “Dilemmas of the Heart: Rural Working Women and their Hopes for the Future” in Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move, pp. 131–150; Lin Tan and Susan E. Short, “Living as Double Outsiders: Migrant Women’s Experiences of Marriage in a County Level City”, in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid, pp. 151–176.
Binbin Lou et al., “Migration Experiences of Young Women from Four Counties in Sichuan and Anhui”, in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid., pp. 207–242, 223–224.
Tamara Jacka, “Migrant Women’s Stories”, in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid., pp. 279–285, 282.
Tiantian Zheng, “From Peasant Women to Bar Hostesses” in Gaetano and Jacka, Ibid., pp. 80–109, 91.
Called pejoratively dangongmei. Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (Armonk, ny, 2006).
Liu, Migration, Prostitution, Ch. 5, in which she finds all manner of reasons, from supporting families to paying for expensive urban lifestyles; Zheng, “From Peasant Women to Bar Hostesses”, pp. 82–85, stresses rural women’s need to adopt urban styles to avoid discrimination and to be able to both find work and a husband.
According to 1991 and 1999 Women’s Federation surveys, reported in Ren Xin, “Prostitution and Employment Opportunities for Women”, available at: http://www.lolapress.org/artenglish/xinre13.htm; last accessed 10 July 2017, and Quanhe Yang and Guo Fei, "Occupational Attainments of Rural to Urban Temporary Economic Migrants in China 1985–1990”, International Migration Review, 30 (1996), pp. 771–787, more than 800,000 women were laid off in the 1990s and the Women’s Federation retrained over 990,000.
Xin, “Prostitution and Employment”. See the discussion of “pr Ladies” in Ann Jordan, “Human Rights, Violence against Women, and Economic Development”, Columbia University Online Journal of Gender and Law, 5 (1996), pp. 216–272, 261 fn17.
Most writing about prostitution proceeds from these hierarchies with their differences in women’s backgrounds, education, age, health, and economic status, although some scholars see the categories as more ideal than real; see Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 14.
Ibid., Chs 1, 3; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, Ch. 2.
Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 76–79.
“Sex Work in China”, Asia Monitor Resource Center, available at: http://www.amrc.org.hk/content/sex-work-china; last accessed 12 July 2017.
Called shuyu, a term that harks back nearly 1,000 years, but also known as guanren, “official persons”, perhaps harking back to Yuan and Ming court prostitution, xiansheng (mister), “singsong girls”, or shushi, “storytelling officials.” The most well-known were ming-ji “famous/prestigious courtesans”. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures.
These women were referred to as changsan, the “long three”, referring to dominos and the old fee of 3 yuan for a drink and another 3 for sex; they were at the top of the hierarchy in Shanghai in the twentieth century.
Called ersan, “two-three” and yao-er, “one-two” also named for dominos, with ersan absorbed into changsan (and both still calling themselves courtesans). Yao er survived through the Republican era.
Trysting houses were referred to first as taiji and then later as xianrouzhuang with the fast food connotations of salt pork.
Yeji or zhiji, these mobile (liuji) sex workers were further divided into xiaji (“lower class”) or putong (“ordinary”).
Huayan jian or yanhua jian.
Dingpeng. All the above categories are described in Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 41–53; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Chs 1–3; Baosheng Yu [Wang Tao], Yinru Zazhi [Miscellaneous Notes from the Seaside] (Shanghai, 1870, reprinted in 1989). Henriot lists other groups important in the 1930s and ‘40s that probably involved occasional prostitution, but he argues they should not be included in any official taxonomy; they include masseuses, waitresses, and professional (taxi) dancers in the new dance halls. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 4.
Mann, Gender and Sexuality, p. 149.
Hui-ling Chou, “Striking Their Own Poses: the History of Cross-Dressing on the Chinese Stage”, The Drama Review, 42 (1997), pp. 130–152, 147; Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth Century China (Seattle, 2009), pp. 46–59; Mann, Gender and Sexuality, p. 150.
In Chinese, second wives are ernai; contracted girls are baopo; escort girls are peinu; “three accompaniment girls” are sanpeixiaojie; “ding dong girls” are ding dong xiaojie; massage parlour girls are falangmei; streetwalkers are jienu; and at the bottom, shantytown prostitutes are xiagongpeng. See the discussion in Asia Monitor Resource Center, “Sex Work in China.”
As described in Honig, Sisters and Strangers.
Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 135.
Both twentieth-century social surveys and extensive records kept at rescue institutions like the Anti-Kidnapping Society (set up by local Chinese) and the western missionary-run Door of Hope have provided little evidence for regional or ethnic compartmentalization. Most elite courtesans claimed to have come from Suzhou with its traditional literati allure, but much of this was probably false advertising. Comparatively small numbers of elite prostitutes from Canton and Ningbo entertained men from those areas. Prostitutes from eastern Guangdong who had first serviced foreign sailors there, derogatorily labelled “salt water sisters”, made their way to Shanghai by the late nineteenth century to work with poor dock workers and sailors in the Hangkou port area. Some authors assert that only poor, desperate, and unhealthy women would do this work, while others attest to the striking differences in style, song, and dress of these women and their rejection by other prostitutes and Chinese clients; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 40. Jacka and Gaetano, On the Move, pp. 24–25 report that in one establishment 72 per cent were from a single area and 95 per cent were from a single area in another, with another study reporting that 51 per cent of migrants from Sichuan follow their provincial counterparts. Perhaps migrants travel with fellow migrants and separate later. Also, see the women interviewed by Wei Zhong, “Red Light District” cited in Zhong, “A Close Look at China’s Sex Industry” in Lianhe Zaobao (October 2, 2000).
Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 48; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 90.
Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 333–343.
Zong, “Close Look”.
Xin, “Prostitution and Employment Opportunities for Women”.
Zhong, “Close Look”.
One of the unintended consequences of China’s draconian One Child Policy which has been effect since 1980 is that there are now an average of 100 females for every 120 males in the population, and in some areas the demographic sex imbalance exceeds 100/150. Predictions are that by 2020 there will be 40 million men unable to find wives. The result will be a far higher demand for sex workers, which ironically will remove even more women from the marriage market. Under these circumstances, the sale and/or kidnapping of female children for wives or prostitutes is likely to increase, and there is anecdotal evidence that this is happening already. Susan Greenhalgh, “Patriarchal Demographics: China’s Sex Ratios Reconsidered”, Population and Development Review, 38 (2013), pp. 130–149, 134–135.
Vitiello, Libertine’s Friend, pp. 6–9, 251 fn 6; Ruan, Sex in China, Ch. 7.
Widely reported on, as in the South China Morning Post, 12 November 2011.
Xiao di are “money boys”. Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, argues that many migrant males turn to prostitution as the only way to make money but as the result of government repression, their low rural status and general homophobic culture, these men are the “transient queer labour” who are always on the move; also see Xing Zhao “Selling Smiles: Inside the World of Shanghai’s Male Sex Workers” in cnn International, 30 June 2010; available at: www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/selling-smiles-shanghais-male-sex-workers; last accessed 23 September 2011; Vivien Cui “Money Boys Become Currency of Pimps”, in South China Morning Post, 25 October 2005; China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum, “Research”.
China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum, “Research”; also see Ruan, Sex in China, Ch. 8.
Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 3.
Zheng, Red Lights, pp. 70–72, 83–85, 90–92, 104, 159; Min, Migration, pp. 133–138; Henriot, Sex and Sexuality, Ch. 6; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 145–165.
Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, p. 149.
Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 36, 143, 174–176, 316, 348, 463 fn 138, Ch. 9; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality; Zheng, Red Lights.
Kyle Macpherson, A Wilderness of Marshes: The Origins of Public Health in Shanghai, 1843–1893 (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 213–258.
Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, Ch. 8.
Zheng, Red Lights, p. 62; another study found only 13 per cent in 1995 reported using condoms with 20 per cent in 2002; condom use does not appear to have been openly discussed until the 1940s and even now discussions of it are relatively rare, although the medical literature suggests there were rather effective traditional methods for preventing pregnancy.
Joan Kaufmann “hiv, Sex Work, and Civil Society in China”, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 204 supplement 5 (2011), pp. 218–222. Also see China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum “Research on Crackdown”. According to an article by Maureen Fan, “Prostitution Flourishes in China”, Washington Post 8 April 2007, sociologist Jing Jun reported that in one study, older more desperate female sex workers had higher rates of infection, with 60 per cent of workers aged over 60 infected with hiv.
My research on rescued prostitutes at the Door of Hope attests to the often powerful ties that existed within these establishments, even though many verged on the abusive. Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise, 1984.
Vivien Cui, “Money Boys”, cites the cases of Li Ning, who manages money boys in Nanjing, and Bing Bing in Dalian, who at any time has thirty money boys in his employ with hundreds of clients, having worked over the years with more than 500 boys.
Zheng, Red Lights, Ch. 7.
In fact, Catherine Vance Yeh has argued that when high-level courtesans moved from Jiangnan to Shanghai after the mid-nineteenth century rebellions, courtesans themselves took advantage of the foreign concessions to redefine their use of space and time so they could attract more wealthy merchants rather than traditional literati as lovers (often popular male opera stars) in their private houses (sidi or sifang) and to use parks and carriages as newly defined public spaces for their own purposes. Yeh, “Playing with the Public: Late Qing Courtesans and their Opera Singer Lovers” in Goodman and Larson, Gender in Motion, pp. 145–168, 145–156.
Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 62–64.
Portrayed most recently in the Zhang Yimou film, Flowers of War based on the Yan Galing novel of the same name. Historian Catherine Vance Yeh in Gender in Motion, “Playing with the Public”, asserts that one of the most famous women in Republican China was a courtesan, Xiaofengxian, the favourite of prominent general Cai E. She was literate, interested in literature and politics, and independent (she paid the madam in her brothel so she could choose her visitors), and she took great political risks for her lover. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 171–174, recounts stories of prostitutes around the turn of the century getting involved in patriotic actions; one contributed to the rights recovery movement in 1906, another established a Courtesan Evolution Corps in 1914 to support the new nation, and several prominent courtesans were involved in establishing schools for prostitutes, in line with calls for women’s education in general.
China Sex Worker Organization Network Forum, “Report”; Sara Davis, “Police Crackdowns in China: The Health and Human Rights of Sex Workers”, in Harvard School of Public Health’s blog for Health and Human Rights: An International Journal, 25 March 2012; available at: http://www.hhropenforum.org/tag/anti-prostitution-laws/; last accessed 23 September 2012; Zhao, “Selling Smiles”; Daily Beast, 31 July 2012.
As celebrated in 1980s nostalgic films like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Chen Kaige’s Farewell my Concubine and the images in popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Shanghai pictorials like Duanshizhai huabao with flamboyant clothing of bright colours and extravagant embroidery.
See Henriot, Ch. 1, for the evolution of the chipao; see also Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York, 2008), p. 121.
Like Precious Mirror of Flowers (Pinhua baojian, 1849), Traces of Flowers and Moon (Huayuehen, 1872), Han Bangqing’s The Sing Song Girls of Shanghai (Haishanghua liezhuan, 1894), the sordid Nine-Tailed Tortoise (Jiuweigui, 1911) or for a later period, Eileen Zhang’s Lust, Caution and Love in a Fallen City (New York, 2007). Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 417 fn 8. See also Stephen Cheng, “Flowers of Shanghai and the Late Ch’ing Courtesan Novel” (Unpublished Ph.D., Harvard University, 1979).
Johnson, Shanghai, p. 118.
See Henriot for detailed Shanghai maps showing the shifting geography of prostitution in late Qing/early Republican Shanghai, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 205–222.
Paul Mooney, “China’s Sex Worker Warrior Fights for Prostitutes’ Rights”, Daily Beast, 31 July 2012; Peter Barefoot, “10 rmb Brothel Sex Workers”, available at: https://www.chinasmack.com/10-rmb-brothel-sex-workers-comparing-prostitution-to-farming; last accessed 10 July 2017.
See Elaine Jeffreys, “Debating the Legal Regulation of Sex Related Bribery and Corruption in the prc”, in Jeffreys, Sex and Sexuality, pp. 158–178; Elaine Jeffreys, Prostitute Scandals in China: Policing, Media, and Society (London, 2012).
Ruan, Sex in China, Ch. 2; Mann, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 85–95.
Entertainment districts in the past and brothel districts in the twentieth century were sites of frequent violence and legal disputes, from patrolling police to constant court cases. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, pp. 154–162; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, Ch. 8.
Officials and their sons who frequented brothels were punished; respectable families were legally separated from prostitutes, actors, and singers, and they were forbidden from buying, adopting, or bringing them into their families through marriage. Under the activist Yongzheng emperor (1723–1735), the state undertook far-reaching legal reforms, attempting to incorporate formerly outcast groups within the law, and at the same time invoking the importance of marriage as necessary to bring all men under state control and provide uniformity throughout the empire. Relative tolerance of prostitution (at least when used by men of high status) gave way to powerful prohibitions on the selling of (good) women into prostitution and laws against harbouring prostitutes. Certain sexual practices were forbidden, such as anal penetration, which severely restricted (as least in law) male prostitution. Sommers, Sex, Law, and Society, pp. 292–357; Ruan, Sex in China, p. 97; for the text of the Qing code, see Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 474–476, fn 1.
Mann, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 67–68.
Quoted in Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 187.
Recent work by Elizabeth Remick argues that the early twentieth century regulatory system with its systems of licensing, health examinations, taxation, and a mandatory women’s refuge was borrowed whole cloth from European models in an attempt to thoroughly modernize the state. Elizabeth Remick, Regulating Prostitution: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 (Stanford, 2014). An ill-fated policy of prohibiting prostitution, with a bizarre programme of first thoroughly licensing and then progressively closing brothels, was attempted in 1923, spearheaded by western missionaries (Shanghai was the headquarters for most foreign missionary organizations) working with Chinese Christians in a strident Moral Welfare League, but only in the International Settlement, not the French or Chinese cities. Sue Gronewold, “Encountering Hope: the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai and Taipei” (Unpublished Ph.D., Columbia University, 1996); Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 272–288; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 12.
According to a 1922 survey, half of seventy-one Chinese cities had some kind of prostitute tax; noted in Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 477 fn 4. Shanghai’s five types of houses that were licensed and taxed were: changsan, yao er, “pheasants”, “salt-pork”, and opium.
Further police regulations in the early twentieth century forbade prostitutes from public soliciting, gathering in groups, making fun of each other, speaking in a lascivious or lewd manner, and wearing clothing that was improperly seductive. As prostitution increased, new regulations forbade the use of indecent language and immoral conduct on roads and in public places and outlawed nudity and gambling. Prostitutes could not drink or spend the night in hotels, nor could guests entertain them there. Later, in 1936, escort agencies and dancing companion societies were forbidden. Children were also taken into account; no-one under sixteen could stay overnight in brothels and brothels could not be located near schools. Ibid., pp. 207–213; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Ch. 11.
Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 287.
This was helped by the presence of a strong Chinese state, the disappearance of powerful gangs who had either fled in 1949 or been executed as counterrevolutionaries, and the fact that many women returned to their rural homes or found other jobs. The execution of traffickers, the arrest of brothel owners, and the closing of all brothels were coupled with the forced re-education of prostitutes in a Women’s Labour Training Institute under the aegis of the Social Affairs Bureau; many women were eventually moved back to their rural homes, some got jobs in the city, and a large group who did not have families were sent to state farms in remote border regions. Marriage was part of the package for as many as possible, in line with Chinese attitudes about marriage as a form of social control. Ibid., Ch. 13; Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, p. 153, discusses the conundrum that those with alternative sexualities find themselves in, as their lifestyles are labelled deviant and pathological.
Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 332.
Ren Xin, “Prostitution and Economic Modernization of China” in Violence against Women, 5 (1999), pp. 1411–1414; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 333–343.
Early in the Reform Era, when it appeared that prostitution might make a come-back, all other provinces followed Guangdong province in the south (where many of the first special economic zones were located) in issuing “Provincial Provisional Rules on Banning Selling and Buying of Sex”, followed ten years later in 1991 by the National People’s Congress’ “Decision on Strictly Forbidding the Selling and Buying of Sex” and in 1993 by the State Council’s “Rules Regarding the Detention and Education of People Who Sell and Buy Sex” particularly aimed at the prevention of venereal diseases. In 1997 the prc’s Criminal Code law reaffirmed the prohibition on organizing, coercing, inducing, sheltering, or facilitating prostitution, accompanied that year by Communist Party rules against Party members engaging in the buying or selling of sex. In 1999 the State Council issued rules banning businesses from engaging in prostitution: “Regulations Regarding the Management of Public Places of Entertainment”. Zhang Heqing, “Female Sex Sellers and Public Policy in the People’s Republic of China”, in Jeffreys, Sex and Sexuality, pp. 139–158, 142.
A particularly aggressive campaign is going on at present under an administration that came into office promising to eradicate high-level corruption and special privileges; the previous national campaign was in 2010, with a special urgency in Shanghai because the Shanghai Expo was being held that year. An earlier campaign in 1997 netted 432,000 sex workers, a number that has grown exponentially. Those arrested are often treated harshly, beaten, fined (frequently as much as 5,000 yuan, us$800), and perhaps sent to spend years in one of more than 1,000 labour re-education camps (laogai) located in poor remote provinces. China Sex Worker Organization Network, “Research”; Davis, “Police Crackdowns in China”. Forced labour apparently has little effect; most women return to prostitution, probably having learned more about the trade from fellow inmates. Evans, Women and Sexuality, p. 171.
Estimates vary widely. Xue Bai, Toushi sanpeinu [Looking into Escort Girls] (Beijing, 2002) estimated 6–8 million in 2000; the who report in 2004 gave a figure of 6 million with estimates ranging up to 30 million as posited by Huang Yingying et al., “hiv/aids Risk among Brothel-based Female Sex Workers in China: Assessing the Terms, Content, and Knowledge of Sex Work”, Journal of the Sexual Transmission of Disease, 31 (2004), pp. 695–700.
As exhorted in their publications; see Wanning Sun, “Indoctrination, Fetishization, and Compassion: Media Constructions of the Migrant Woman”, in Jacka and Gaetano (eds), On the Move, pp. 109–130, 114–115.
Suiming Pan, William Parish, and Yingying Huang, “Clients of Female Sex Workers: A Population-Based Survey of China”, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 204 supplement 5 (2011), pp. 1211–1217.
Zhang quoting Li in Jeffreys “Female Sex Sellers”, pp. 139–141. Although researchers like Pan Suiming hasten to add that the changes are gendered and generational, with young men and women most affected in the shift from sex for reproduction to sex for pleasure and even sex for leisure, young women are still more constrained by social considerations. Pan, “Transformations in the Primary Life Cycle”. For the effects on the economy, see Ming Xia in Joseph T.H. Lee (ed.), Marginalization in China: Recasting Minority Politics (New York, 2012), p. 111, who quotes prominent economists Ning Liu and Huiming Tien (eds), Heise youhuan [Black Fear] (Beijing, 2001) as saying that twenty million sex workers are involved in an economy of 500 billion yuan (6 per cent of the gdp) and bring in 1,000 billion yuan for spending and consumption.
The ngo Shanghai Leyi (now Xinsheng) works with male sex workers; Project Hope from Hong Kong works on education; other ngos in Shanghai work on health, especially hiv/aids, such as Asia Catalyst, unffa and Amity, a philanthropic missionary group. There are many philanthropic arms of missionary groups such as Amity. To follow government suppression see: http://chinadevelopmentbrief.cn/; last accessed 8 July 2017.
Zheng, Red Lights, p. 245.