Page 109 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

96 ELAINE JEFFREYS
only demonstrated that ‘sex sellers’ do not form an homogeneous group of ‘wage-
labourers’, they have also done much to draw attention to the varied nature of what, in
the absence of any agreed terminology, might be loosely called ‘sex-sector consumers’
and ‘sex-sector capitalists’.

Conclusion

The ongoing struggle of China’s governmental authorities to turn the commercial
hospitality and service industry into a standardised and regulated sector of the economy calls
into question the recent feminist insistence that the international community should
oblige national governments to legally recognise ‘the sex sector’ and hence ‘sex workers’.
While not disputing the validity of concerns about prostitutes’ rights, a consideration of
the Chinese case suggests that such concerns are not only underpinned by liberal
conceptions of the sexual-political subject, they also presume that the organisation of
modern societies is to all extents and purposes identical. To put the matter bluntly,
arguments concerning the perceived benefits that will accrue to sex workers, flowing from
a legal recognition of ‘the sex sector’, effectively assume that all nations possess an
established commercial business sector, with equitable and enforceable labour laws, into
which the ‘prostitute-as-(rightful) worker’ can somehow be slotted.
An examination of the Chinese case further questions the tendency of pro-sex work
activists to homogenise all female sellers of sex as ‘sex workers’ and to treat male buyers
of sex as ‘private consumers’. Given the controversy that currently surrounds the first
two tiers of China’s ‘prostitution hierarchy’ (namely, the practices of ‘keeping a second
wife’ and ‘hiring a short-term mistress’), the act of legally recognising prostitution, if such
an option were socially acceptable and politically feasible in the PRC, would oblige the
Chinese government to determine which particular forms of ‘selling sex’ could be
legitimately defined as ‘work’ and which could not. Likewise, the tendency of the pro-sex
work lobby to elide the male side of demand, on the grounds that male buyers of sex are
individual citizens participating in an unremarkable, ‘private’ transaction, is seriously
challenged in the context of China by the demonstrated link between the demand for
prostitution and the expropriation of public funds.
An examination of the Chinese case thus brings into focus the constant reliance of pro-
sex work activists upon a meta-discourse bounded by Western liberal conceptions of ‘the
individual’, ‘the state’, ‘the law’, and ultimately ‘the UN’, in order to resolve a series of
historically and culturally specific problems with moral dimensions. For all of the
aforementioned reasons, we need to resist the popular association of the concept of ‘sex
work’ with theoretical and political ‘correctness’. Even more importantly, we have to
question the recent tendency of metropolitan commentators to mobilise the concept of
‘sex work’ as a means to demonstrate the assumed (as in ‘already known’) inadequacy of
the PRC’s response to prostitution. Exponents of this approach claim all the kudos that
accrues to those who speak with moral indignity against the Chinese government, and on
behalf of the ‘downtrodden, subaltern prostitute subject’, without the accompanying
ethical burden of investigating whether the strategy they want adopted can be