Page 102 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

FEMINIST PROSTITUTION DEBATES 89
To elaborate, on the basis of policing campaigns conducted during the late 1980s and
early 1990s, by the mid-1990s the Chinese police had apparently determined that
prostitution practices in reform-era China could be categorised according to a descending
9
hierarchy of seven tiers. The first level known as waishi or baoernai refers to women who
act as the ‘second-wives’ or relatively long-term ‘mistresses’ of men with money and
influential positions, including government officials and bureaucratic entrepreneurs from
the mainland, as well as businessmen from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
This practice is defined as prostitution, not a genuine love-relationship, on the grounds
that the women in question actively solicit men with money and rank—namely, men who
can provide them with fixed-term accommodation and a regular allowance. The second
tier, baopo, a ‘hired or packaged wife’, refers to women who also solicit men with money
and rank, but rather than living in flats provided by male buyers of sex, they accompany
their ‘clients’ for a fixed duration of time, for example, during the course of a business
trip, and receive a set payment for doing so. 10
The third tier, santing (the ‘three halls’: geting, wuting, shiting), refers to women who
‘accompany’ men in karaoke/dance venues, bars, restaurants, and teahouses and so on,
and who receive financial recompense in the form of ‘tips’ from the individual men they
accompany, as well as from a share of the profits generated by informal service charges on
the use of facilities and the consumption of food and beverages. Although governmental
authorities in China do not equate ‘hostessing’ with prostitution per se, ‘hostessing’ is
nonetheless viewed as an activity that encourages prostitution by abetting the practice of
‘accompanying first and engaging in prostitutional sex later’. The fourth tier refers to
women who are colloquially referred to as ‘doorbell girls’ (dingdong xiaojie), that is,
women who solicit potential buyers of sex by phoning all the rooms in a given hotel, and
who subsequently announce their arrival at the room of prospective ‘clients’ by knocking
11
on the door or ringing the doorbell. The fifth tier, falangmei, refers to women who
work in places that offer commercial sexual services under the guise of massage or health
and beauty treatments; for instance, in health and fitness centres, beauty parlours,
hairdressing salons, barber shops, bath-houses and saunas. 12
Chinese commentators usually differentiate the two lowest tiers of prostitution
practices from the aforementioned upper five tiers on the grounds that they are
characterised by the more straightforward exchange of sex for financial or material
recompense. In other words, they refer to prostitution practices that are neither explicitly
linked to governmental corruption, nor directly mediated through China’s new
commercial recreational business sector. The sixth tier, jienu, refers to women who solicit
male buyers of sex on the streets, or outside of public places of recreation and
entertainment; for example, at the entrance to hotels and cinemas, and in busy public
spaces such as railways stations and parks. The seventh and lowest tier, xiagongpeng or
zhugongpeng, refers to women who sell sex to China’s new transient labour force of male
workers from the rural countryside. That is to say, it refers to women who sell sex
predominantly to men (read peasants) from the rural hinterland who have migrated to
urban centres in order to work on the construction of primary infrastructure, such as
roads and buildings, and who live in temporary work camps or accommodations. Unlike
women who sell sex in the first five tiers, the Chinese police maintain that women who