Page 107 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

94 ELAINE JEFFREYS
businesses in 1994, and to more than 300 by the end of 1995. Hence, at the start of 1996,
policing authorities estimated that the city of Beijing alone contained 142 business
enterprises offering massage-related services within the confines of high-grade hotels, and
therefore operating on the basis of high capital overheads, and 180 business enterprises
offering massage-related services within more localised venues such as health centres,
hairdressing salons and beauty parlours, and therefore operating on the basis of a lower
capital outlay (Xin Ran 1996:14–20).
In short, by the start of the new millennium a whole host of disparate concerns had
converged to ensure that China’s burgeoning hospitality and service industry was posited
as a necessary target of ‘macro political’ intervention. I say ‘necessary’ in the sense that, if
the late 1999 ‘strike hard’ campaign to enforce the Entertainment Regulations was
designed to control illicit business operations and the activities of ‘hostesses-cum-sexual
service providers’, the follow-up campaign of 2000 further aimed to address public and
governmental concerns over the continued link between the provision of commercial
sexual services and governmental corruption. In consequence, the Ministry of Public
Security and the Ministry of Culture were urged by the National People’s Congress to
organise a major crackdown on ‘accompaniment-style services’ within China’s
recreational venues, irrespective of the cost to relevant departments, and irrespective of
local government fears concerning the potentially deleterious short-term economic effects
on local tourism and service industries of doing so. The response was a nationwide
campaign to reduce drastically the number of recreational business operations in the PRC,
both in order to control the heavy competition amongst them, which is deemed to
encourage prostitution and illegality, and also to curb the excessive establishment of
luxury nightclubs and ‘private’ or ‘covert’ venues—namely, business enterprises that are
not patronised routinely or openly by the general public, and therefore may be profiting
from the abuse of public funds, the provision of proscribed activities, and on the basis of
local government and police protection (Zhang Zhiping 2000:33).
Accordingly, during the latter half of 2000, China’s public security forces, in
conjunction with numerous other government departments, closed down nearly 1 million
recreational business operations of miscellaneous forms (‘Million Bars Closed’ 2001:22),
including hotels, karaoke/dance venues, bars, ‘massage parlours’, saunas, bath-houses,
health and fitness centres, beauty salons, hairdressing salons, teahouses, video arcades and
Internet cafes, the overwhelming majority of which were closed for not possessing
relevant business licences and standard fire and safety equipment. The tactics used to
achieve the temporary and possibly permanent closure of such business operations merit
attention, not because they underscore the ‘arbitrary powers’ of the Chinese police, but
rather because they reveal an underlying desire to bring all commercial enterprises into
the domain of governmental administration, by obliging them to ‘re-register’ with the
relevant authorities and thereby obliging them to comply further with existing
regulations, including extant labour and commercial laws. Likewise, the very diversity of
venues that were closed down by the Chinese police demonstrates that this campaign did
not target prostitution alone. It targeted a whole host of ‘ungoverned’, as in illicit,
irregular, and/or unlicensed, business operations.