Page 106 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

FEMINIST PROSTITUTION DEBATES 93
the 1990s, culminating in the ‘strike hard’ campaigns of late 1999 and 2000 to enforce the
1999 Regulations Concerning the Management of Public Places of Entertainment
(hereafter the Entertainment Regulations) (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan
1999). This sector of the economy has become an explicit target of combined campaigns
against illegality, prostitution and corruption, because campaigns conducted during the
late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly in southern China’s new Special Economic
Zones or open coastal cities, had demonstrated that recreational business enterprises
frequently operate as ‘fronts’ for the crime of organising prostitution, as well as what is
now described as the crime of hiring or keeping women to engage in ‘obscene’ activities
with other people. These preliminary investigations had also revealed that recreational
business operations are directly linked to governmental corruption, in the form of local
government involvement or collusion in the running of such enterprises, and in the more
indirect form of the widespread abuse of public funds to finance consumption within such
venues.
In the early 1990s, for instance, the National Bureau of Statistics estimated that
between 60 and 70 per cent of the income accruing to high-grade hotels, guesthouses,
restaurants and karaoke/dance venues came from consumers spending public funds, at an
estimated annual cost to the public of around 800 billion yuan (Wang Tie 1993:35; Zhang
Ping 1993:25; Zhao Jianmei 1994:35). Given that these consumers are predominantly
(male) government employees, it is generally accepted that their conduct has to be
corrected. Hence practices such as spending public funds within commercial recreational
venues, using public funds to hire the company of ‘short-term hostesses-cum-mistresses’,
and local government complicity in the running of illicit businesses, including those that
provide commercial sexual services, were constructed as problems in need of urgent
remedial attention. During the mid to late 1990s, therefore, China’s relevant authorities
introduced a whole host of regulations designed to ban members of the public security
forces, and other kinds of government employees, both from running recreational and
entertainment venues and from protecting illegal business operations in this connection
(‘Army Banned from Business’ 1998). Concomitantly, numerous regulations were
introduced in order to curb the spending of public funds within such venues. These measures
are now being policed, not strictly on the basis of police-led campaigns and information
derived from public informants, but on the basis of disciplinary procedures that are
integral to the reform era itself—namely, via the practice established in 1998 of auditing
government officials, and thereby combining the forces of the CCP’s disciplinary
committees with those of the State Auditing Administration (Bruel and Wu 2000:36).
However, if campaigns conducted during the late 1980s and early 1990s helped to
expose the complex links between governmental corruption and commercial sexual
activities, the process of economic development itself has effectively ensured that the task
of ‘cleaning up’ China’s burgeoning hospitality and recreational business sector has only
recently been presented as a task for national government. To offer one of many possible
examples, reports by policing authorities in Beijing suggest that they were not aware of
any commercial enterprises offering recreational, as opposed, to medical massage services
in the capital until late 1992. By the end of 1993, the Beijing police had either registe-
red, or were aware of, 21 such business enterprises; and this number expanded to 77