Page 101 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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suppression of prostitution businesses and practices. Specifically, the ‘Consensus
Recommendations’ argue that the punitive emphasis of China’s prostitution controls
should be directed at those who buy sex and those who organise prostitution, especially
government officials and law-enforcement agents. Given that many of the concerns
outlined in the ‘Consensus and Recommendations’ replicate those of the NGO report,
even though they do not admit the liberal construction of the prostitute subject as an
oppressed sexual minority, a delimited version of the legal response advocated by the
feminist anti-prostitution lobby might offer a more effective means to agitate for women’s
rights in China. That is to say, if the NGOs in question are truly concerned with achieving
immediate improvements in the lives of Chinese women in prostitution, they might be
better advised to recognise the existing parameters and domestically acknowledged
limitations of the PRC’s prostitution controls, and offer interim support for the
domestically generated recommendation that the Chinese government provide supportive
programmes for women in prostitution, whilst simultaneously directing official attention
towards those who create the demand for and organise prostitution.

Regulating the selling and buying of sex in the PRC
The actual practice of prostitution in the PRC is intricately connected with the new socio-
economic hierarchies of the reform period and with an issue of critical importance to
China’s future—corruption by official cadres. Our knowledge of prostitution in the PRC
is largely a product of investigations conducted by or under the auspices of the Chinese
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police. For, in order to manage ‘the problem of prostitution’, and hence to render
prostitution practices and businesses into a form that can be made open to programmes of
corrective intervention, the Chinese police have been obliged to conceptualise the field
upon which they are expected to intervene. Police-led campaigns have been accompanied
by nationwide ‘media blitzes’—blitzes designed to publicise the PRC’s laws and
regulations, as well as to arouse public awareness of the specific objectives of a given
campaign, and thereby induce people to become active citizens by disclosing, reporting,
and criticising, the existence of proscribed activities. The general public is thus made
aware how China’s policing authorities have chosen to conceptualise and categorise ‘the
problem of prostitution’.
What has emerged from the ongoing campaign process, therefore, is a composite
picture of the various forms of prostitution practices and businesses that exist in China
today. This ‘picture’ highlights the heterogenous nature of sellers and buyers of sex in
PRC by showing that prostitution practices are characterised by a proliferation of types,
venues, prices and labour migration patterns which both reflect and exacerbate the kinds
of gendered and socio-economic hierarchies that make up contemporary Chinese society
This ‘picture’ also undermines the liberal construction of prostitution as a ‘private and
unremarkable transaction’ by exposing the links between certain forms of selling sex and
governmental corruption. In doing so, it points to the practical difficulty of unifying the
forms of selling and buying sex that exist in present-day China under the rubric of
‘sex work’.