Page 104 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

FEMINIST PROSTITUTION DEBATES 91
1997 Communist Party Discipline Regulations, for instance, contain specific provisions to
the effect that party members will be stripped of their posts for using their position and/
or public funds to keep a ‘second wife’, a ‘hired wife’, and to buy sexual services
(‘Communist Party Discipline Regulations’ 1997). Nonetheless, the Chinese police have
been consistently accused of refusing to police such phenomena actively, with
commentators claiming that they endorse and partake of the privileges that accrue to
China’s governmental and entrepreneurial elite, or China’s nouveaux riche (Pan Suiming
1996:52–7).
But, if the Chinese public security forces have so far proved unable to police
prostitution practices in the form of keeping a ‘second wife’ or hiring a ‘shortterm
mistress’, it is equally clear that the changes engendered by the process of economic
reform have effectively robbed them of the capacity to do so. After all, despite trenchant
condemnation of ‘concubinage’ and ‘mistress-related corruption’, the growing public
acceptance of pre-marital and extra-marital affairs has meant that the Chinese police are
now professionally constrained not to intrude on people’s personal relationships in an
overt or coercive manner. As a result, they are more or less obliged to know that the
particular relationship in question is ‘bigamous’ or ‘prostitution-like’ before they can take
appropriate action (Jiang Rongsheng 1992:34). Previously, such knowledge often came
from an aggrieved spouse on the understanding that it would result in the ‘other woman’
being detained by the Chinese public security forces, whereas no serious action would be
taken against the man in question. However, given that government employees convicted
of engaging in such practices now stand to lose their livelihood and public standing (that
is, the legal weight of such sanctions is now also located on the male side of demand), this
particular source of information is presumably not so forthcoming.
In a similar vein, the ability of the Chinese police to control ‘mistress-related
corruption’, particularly in the form of hiring a female seller of sex for the duration of a
business trip, is limited by the fact that such women are usually presented to hotel
personnel as personal secretaries, public relations officers, lovers and so forth. In
consequence, the capacity of local security organisations to police this form of prostitution
is reduced to the tactic of enforcing laws forbidding the hiring of hotel rooms to couples
of the opposite sex who cannot produce a valid marriage certificate, and, subsequently, by
raiding rooms where relevant personnel have informed them that members of the
opposite sex are ‘keeping company after normal hours’. Not surprisingly, this tactic has
proved to be extremely unpopular with the general public and overseas tourists alike.
Moreover, it has simply encouraged women who sell sex in hotels to ply their ‘trade’
during the day instead of during the evening. In fact, although the practice of selling sex
by telephoning hotel rooms is now banned as comprising a form of sexual harassment,
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presumably due to complaints by affronted (male) hotel guests, the Chinese police are still
obliged to rely on hotel security personnel to apprise them of the existence of suspected
prostitution offenders. And, for a wide variety of reasons—including indifference on the
part of hotel personnel, the fact that hotel staff may be receiving ‘kickbacks’ from sellers
and buyers of sex, and a general unwillingness on the part of those in charge to tarnish the
‘clean’ record of a given venue and thereby bring themselves to the attention of Chinese
public security organs—this information is often not forthcoming.