Page 105 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

92 ELAINE JEFFREYS
Likewise, apart from conducting regular patrols of public spaces, and hence attempting
to use a strong (and costly) police presence as a deterrent, the ability of Chinese policing
authorities to apprehend sellers and buyers of sex in the two lowest tiers of China’s
prostitution hierarchy is heavily dependent on the ‘eyes and ears’ of members of auxiliary
mass-line organisations. In consequence, sellers and buyers of sex who meet on the streets
have adopted a wide range of tactics designed to avoid apprehension, such as buying a
valid train ticket that can be subsequently (re)sold, and therefore having a legitimate
reason for ‘hanging around’ a busy train station and engaging in ‘idle conversation’ with
various people. Concomitantly, prospective sellers and buyers of sex may
simply establish, often via a ‘go-between’, that they have a mutual interest in participating
in the prostitution transaction, and then arrange to meet at a later hour or day, and in a
different place, both in order to reduce the initial negotiation time, and also to avoid
attracting unwanted attention by leaving together. Indeed, scholars of Chinese policing
often aver that the spatial mobility which is afforded to the ‘prostitution-offender
population’ by virtue of modern communications systems, such as mobile phones and
electronic pagers, and by modern forms of transportation, such as taxis and private cars, has
severely reduced their ability to determine exactly who is engaged in acts of solicitation
and who constitutes a legitimate suspect (Ouyang Tao 1994:15–18).
Unlike street sellers of sex, who utilise spatial tactics to evade the ‘eyes and ears’ of
localised mass-line security organisations, women who sell sex to migrant workers feature
in ‘apprehension statistics’ precisely because of the ‘floating’ nature of the transient
population. By this I mean that women in the lowest tier of China’s ‘prostitution
hierarchy’ are far more likely to be apprehended as an indirect result of the system of
establishing checks over the transient labour force and migrant-related accommodations
than as a direct consequence of the implementation of ‘draconian’ anti-prostitution
campaigns. For although such women feature in the previously mentioned hierarchy of
prostitution practices, they feature less heavily in campaign-related evaluations than
women who sell sex in recreational business enterprises (Beijing dongcheng gongan fenju
1993:14–17).
This latter consideration brings into question the standard feminist criticism that the
PRC’s prostitution controls, as with ‘prohibitory’ approaches everywhere, are targeted
primarily at the lowest levels of the prostitution hierarchy. Women who sell sex to
migrant workers are indubitably vulnerable to police apprehension by virtue of their low
socio-economic position and due to the problematic nature of existing controls over the
transient labour force. But this vulnerability is not the result of a deliberate attempt on the
part of the Chinese public security forces to target the most downtrodden of female
prostitutes. It is a side-effect of various mass-line policing efforts—often conducted under
the auspices of non-professional, localised crime prevention teams—to ensure that male
members of the ‘floating population’, in particular, possess appropriate work-cards and
temporary residency permits, so as to contain the perceived high levels of criminality
associated with this new sector of China’s urban population. 14
In consequence, the primary target of the PRC’s prostitution controls in practice is
China’s burgeoning hospitality and entertainment industry. Recreational venues were
made an increasing focus of new regulatory measures and policing campaigns throughout