Page 94 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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Feminist prostitution debates
Are there any sex workers in China?

Elaine Jeffreys

Are there any sex workers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? At first glance, this
question may seem superfluous. After all, it is well known that, following its accession to
political power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) embarked upon a series of
campaigns designed to eradicate prostitution from mainland China, and its apparent
success in realising this goal by the late 1950s was subsequently acclaimed as one of the
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major achievements of the new regime. This meant that the subject of prostitution
effectively disappeared as a serious object of governmental and intellectual concern in the
PRC for a period of nearly three decades. Since the mid to late 1980s, however,
governmental authorities in the PRC have readily admitted that the phenomenon of
prostitution has not only reappeared on the mainland but that it also constitutes a
widespread and growing problem (Quanguo renda changweihui 1991:12–13). In fact, it is
now considered that new laws and regulatory measures have proved unable to curb the
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prostitution business. My opening question is thus purely rhetorical: sellers of sex can be
found throughout present-day China.
For anyone interested in the politics of cross-cultural translation and transnational
feminism, however, my opening question is far from redundant. Nowadays it is more or
less standard academic practice to substitute the words ‘prostitute/prostitution’ with the
terms ‘sex work/sex worker’ on the grounds that the latter avoid the pejorative moral
connotations of the former, by suggesting that the provision of sexual services constitutes
a form of labour like any other, and that individuals have the right to realise economic
determination and control the use of their own bodies. The popularity of this practice,
even though the notion of sex work remains fiercely contested within certain feminist
circles, is amply demonstrated by the recent plethora of texts that deploy the terms ‘sex
work/sex worker’ to discuss commercial sexual activities in non-Euramerican settings,
for instance, ‘Chinese Sex Workers in the Reform Period’ by Gail Hershatter (1996:
199–224). While I personally approve efforts to improve the position of women in
prostitution, it nonetheless strikes me that many of these texts fail to consider whether the
term ‘sex work’ can be successfully transposed across different cultural and temporal
boundaries. To pose the question ‘Are there any sex workers in the PRC?’ is thus to query
the homogenising practice of translating the selling and buying of sex in terms of
metropolitan concerns with issues of individual rights and identity politics.
The need to query the transcontextual application of terms such as ‘sex work’ and ‘sex
worker’ is highlighted by the fact that the Chinese government is currently under pressure