Page 20 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

INTRODUCTION 7
UN frameworks favouring the legalising and regulating of prostitution as ‘sex work’.
Domestic interests in public health, public security and taxation, as well as various
international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are all lobbying the Chinese
government to legalise the sex industry. However, these attempts are meeting sustained
resistance from the All China Woman’s Federation, an arm of the Chinese state, which
continues to put forward its historical position that the commercialisation of sex is
‘exploitation’, ‘harmful’ to women’s rights and completely inappropriate in a socialist
state. The Women’s Federation has further lobbied the government to prohibit the paid
mistresses, calling it a type of ‘concubinage’, which should be banned in line with the
Marriage Law of 2001.
China’s stance on prostitution has been subject to explicit criticism by the UN Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women for failing to adequately
tackle the problem of ‘enforced’ prostitution, on the one hand, and for its failure to
legalise ‘voluntary’ prostitution, on the other. Internally, the Chinese government meets
with criticism from its own public health sector, sociologists and some women studies
scholars who argue that current Chinese policy in this field is ‘gender biased and
discriminatory’ and leads to ‘human rights abuses’.
As Jeffreys reports, the Chinese government has tried various strategies to control
prostitution, particularly in the hospitality and entertainment industries. These campaigns
have exposed direct links between the sale of sex in these industries and governmental
corruption, particularly the collusion of local governments in the running of these sorts of
enterprises. In response to these problems, the disciplinary committees of the Chinese
Communist Party and the State Auditing Administration have conducted audits to
monitor the situation. These audits reveal that vast amounts of public sector funds have
been expended in the hospitality and entertainment industries in recent decades, including
an unknown portion in the provision of sexual services to government employees. In the
late 1990s and the year 2000 large-scale crackdowns were carried out by the state aimed
at closing ‘unregulated’ enterprises in the hospitality and entertainment industries. The
importance of prostitution to national economic growth became apparent when this
official crackdown was followed by a slump in China’s GDP of 1 per cent.
Jeffreys argues that the Western ‘pro-sex work’ position is simply inappropriate to the
Chinese context. First, the ‘liberal underpinning’ of the pro-sex lobby is alien to historical
understandings and practices in China. Second, even if prostitution was recognised as a
form of ‘paid labour’, the general lack of independent trade unions and of civil rights in
occupational health and safety issues would ensure that the ‘sex worker’ remained highly
vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Finally, in the Chinese case the complex
interpenetration of governmental regulation, on the one hand, and governmental
corruption, on the other, makes for a very distinctive social context for the practice of
prostitution.
Among the implications of Jeffreys’ study is that Chinese ‘modernity’ is of a different
cast from that of the West. The distinctive nature of the sex industry in China undercuts
the liberal Western notion that ‘the organisation of modern societies is to all extents and
purposes identical’. In its audits and crackdowns, the punitive force of the Chinese state
has drawn attention to the (usually male) proprietors of businesses selling sexual services