Page 19 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

6 ANNE E.MCLAREN
employer and employee. The state-operated Women’s Federation was charged with
regulating the industry from 1983 on. The Federation works directly with agencies in
more than ten provinces to recruit domestic workers for the Beijing market. In this
process, the maid has gained a new and imposing title, ‘household domestic worker’
(jiazheng fuwu yuan), a ponderous word strikingly different from the intimacy of the term
‘nanny’ (baomu) with its implications of kinship relations. In this way state intervention has
also led to the professionalisation of the occupation of maid.
Together with the reappearance of the maid, the reform period was also marked by
that of the prostitute in Chinese society. As with the market for maids, it took the state
some time to recognise publicly that prostitution existed and to attempt to police it.
Unlike the maids, now registered by the state as ‘domestic workers’, the prostitute has
continued to be an illegal element in the body politic. Prostitution remained largely
underground and hence unrecognised in the 1980s. However, from the early 1990s, with
growing concerns about the links between prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases,
criminality and official corruption, the Chinese state has increasingly sought to control and
regulate prostitution and to lay criminal charges against ‘the buyers and sellers of sex’.
Drawing from her own fieldwork and from police and legal reports, Jeffreys offers us a
fascinating overview of the structure of the sex industry in China. She argues that
prostitution in China is practised within a complex seven-tier hierarchy At the top are the
long-term mistresses (‘second wives’) of wealthy and influential men, especially
government officials and entrepreneurs from within China and other East Asian countries.
The women ‘actively solicit’ men who can provide them with an allowance and
accommodation. Beneath them in popular perceptions of status one finds the ‘hired wife’
who accompanies a man for a limited time—for example, on a business trip—for a set
payment. The third type of prostitute works for the hospitality industry and receive funds
from the men they ‘accompany’ as ‘hostess’ as well as a share from the profits of the site
where they work (for example, a karaoke venue or a bar). A fourth category, the
‘doorbell girls’, actively solicit customers in hotels, and the fifth tier are the ‘hairdresser
sisters’ who work in massage or beauty parlours, gym centres and similar. The final two
categories have the lowest status because the only service provided is a sexual one; these
are the ‘street women’ who solicit men in public spaces and the women of the transient
labour camps. The latter service the needs of ‘migrant workers’ from China’s provinces
who flock to the city to work in urban construction projects.
State intervention in the sex industry has become complicated with the introduction
into China of new ideas from the West that prostitution should be considered as a
commercial business transaction or a civil rights issue, not as a matter of the victimisation
of women or of criminality. The new trend in the West is best summed up in the
nomenclature for the individual who sells sexual services—a ‘sex worker’, not the
pejorative ‘prostitute’. Jeffrey’s focuses on the cross-currents of the debate in China
about the nature of the selling of sex as a form of ‘labour’: is it a criminal act, proof of the
exploitation of women, or a consciously chosen career option—‘a form of labour like any
other’?
At stake are issues not just of women’s rights but also of public health, particularly
control of the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus, and of China’s position with regard to new