Page 110 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

FEMINIST PROSTITUTION DEBATES 97
operationalised in different cultural contexts in a way that is unambiguously better than
the strategy which they want replaced.
As a corollary, therefore, we need to be wary of dismissing the platform of the feminist
anti-prostitution lobby out of hand. Radical feminist theorisations of sexuality may be
institutionally outmoded, but this does not mean that the strategy advocated by the
feminist anti-prostitution lobby possesses no practical utility. There can be little doubt that
the ‘learned’ cultural memory of the CCP’s successful eradication of brothel prostitution
in the 1950s, combined with growing international concerns over transnational crime and
women’s human rights, has meant that the PRC’s prostitution laws bear a surface
resemblance to the strategy advocated by the feminist anti-prostitution lobby. This
commonality could offer feminist activists on both sides of the ‘prostitution/sex-work
divide’ a means to agitate for improvements in the PRC’s prostitution controls, not by
demanding the socially and politically ‘unthinkable’, but rather by following the ACWF’s
tactic of exploiting the interstices created by the historical and legal indeterminacy of the
prostitution transaction in China as neither a ‘crime’ nor an ‘accepted social practice’, and
also by encouraging the recent shift of China’s governmental authorities towards
problematising the male side of demand. Concomitantly, an examination of the diverse
ways in which China’s governmental authorities have sought to transform the ethical
milieus of recreational business ventures could open the theoretical space for inventing
other possible practicable alternatives to the governance of prostitution.
In sum, the professed aim of metropolitan human rights activists vis-à-vis the
governance of prostitution—namely, to stop the exploitation of women in prostitution—
might be better advanced by examining the complex governmental landscape in which
sexual-political subjects such as ‘sellers and buyers of sex’ have been both created and
positioned in China, rather than measuring the apparent imperfections of the PRC’s
prostitution controls with reference to an ‘idealised’ transnational response. The adoption
of such a reading tactic would allow for different kinds of questions to be asked and
different local responses to the governance of prostitution businesses and practices to be
envisaged. In doing so, it would enable us to analyse and politically engage with the
operation of government in present-day China without assuming that sexual-political,
legal categories such as ‘sex worker’ refer to universal ‘givens’ and subsequently resorting
to the prescriptive dead-ends of morally impelled criticism.

List of terms

ACWF All China Women’s Federation
CATW Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women
GAATW Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women
ICPR International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights