Page 103 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

90 ELAINE JEFFREYS
sell sex in the lowest two tiers usually do so in return for small sums of money, and
women in the lowest tier often do so in exchange for food and shelter.
Although this typology predominantly classifies urban modes of prostitution, and does
not exhaust the forms of prostitution businesses and practices that exist in the PRC today,
it nonetheless underscores the complexity of the issues that the Chinese police have both
identified and subsequently been enjoined to address. For example, two of the most
controversial modes of selling and buying sex in present-day China are the practices of
keeping a ‘second wife’ and ‘hiring a wife’. These practices have become the focus of
heated public debate because they are explicitly linked to government corruption through
the embezzlement of public funds and the appropriation of public resources to finance a
‘second home’ and/or to support a ‘short-term mistress’ (Hu Qihua 2000:2). In
consequence, many domestic commentators contend that these practices should be made
the first and foremost subject of China’s prostitution controls because they constitute a
concrete expression of ‘bourgeois right’. That is to say, the diffident policing of such
practices demonstrates that government officials both conceive of themselves and are
treated as a privileged class who are somehow ‘above the law’, whereas ordinary citizens
are subjected to the full (moral and penal) brunt of China’s prostitution controls (Pan
Suiming 1996:52–7).
Members of the ACWF similarly maintain that the practices of ‘keeping a second wife’
and ‘hiring a short-term mistress’ should be made an explicit target of governmental
controls, albeit for somewhat different reasons. While concurring that the continued
existence of such practices undermines the credibility of the CCP as an exemplary
‘vanguard party’, the ACWF were actively involved in efforts to see ‘concubinage’ and
‘mistress-related corruption’ banned according to the PRC’s new Marriage Law of 2001
as practices that violate the emotional and economic surety of the marriage contract. I
stress the notion of economic surety here because foreign newspaper correspondents
tended to portray the ACWF’s efforts as a sign that China is peculiarly ‘anti-sex’, or,
more precisely, opposed to sex in any form other than monogamous marital sex.
However, the underlying logic of the revisions put forward by the ACWF is not so easily
dismissed, even though those revisions reinforce the institution of the family. According
to members of the ACWF, many divorces stem from infidelity on the part of men and the
PRC’s lack of comprehensive legislation regarding the provision of maintenance places
women in the undesirable position of having to accept marital infidelity or face economic
hardship (Liu Yinglang 1997:4). Put crudely, therefore, the ACWF’s condemnation of
practices such as keeping a ‘second wife’ and hiring a ‘shortterm mistress’ is premised on
the understanding that if men want to ‘have their cake and eat it’, then, they will have to
pay for the consequences of doing so.
Adding to such pressure, women’s groups in Hong Kong and Taiwan also called on the
Chinese government to ban such practices, on the grounds that businessmen from Hong
Kong and Taiwan who work in the PRC often maintain a ‘second wife’ or a series of
‘mistresses’ on the mainland (Kuo 1999; Lander 2000:4; McGivering 1998:8). These
concerns not only fuelled the controversy surrounding the promulgation of the PRC’s
2001 Marriage Law, they have also resulted in the formulation of various other legal
stipulations designed to address the practices of keeping or hiring a ‘second wife’. The