Page 99 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

86 ELAINE JEFFREYS
government officials in China for targeting only the poorest and most vulnerable of female
prostitutes, for penalising women who sell sex while exonerating men who buy sex, for
ignoring the ongoing problems of police and governmental complicity in the running of
prostitution businesses, and for refusing to acknowledge the problems associated with the
policing of the traffic in women. Whilst admitting that the PRC’s prostitution laws are
designed to penalise those who organise prostitution, rather than participants in the
prostitution transaction per se, the report concludes that China has failed to meet
international human rights standards as stipulated by the UN with regard to the regulation
of ‘workers in the sex industry’. More specifically, the report concludes that the PRC has
failed to recognise sex work as a legitimate form of labour as advocated by a 1998 study of
‘the sex sector’ in Southeast Asia, sponsored by the International Labour Organis-
ation (ILO). 5
Contrary to the critical impetus of this particular report, however, the Chinese
government does not have legally to reconfigure prostitution as work in order to meet
extant UN stipulations. This is because the recommendations outlined in the ILO-
sponsored study do not bind state-parties to any course of action and they remain highly
contested. In any case, the PRC’s prostitution laws are not only in keeping with the
abolitionist thrust of the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and
of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949); they also concord with Article 6
of CEDAW, which calls upon signatory nations to suppress all forms of traffic in women
and exploitation of prostitution of women.
Indeed, viewed at the abstract level of the law, the PRC’s prostitution controls are out-
of-step with neither extant UN regulations nor with contemporary feminist strategies. On
the contrary, in banning prostitution as a violation of the rights of ‘woman-as-person’, the
PRC’s prostitution laws offer an imperfect replica of the abolitionist platform advocated by
the feminist anti-prostitution lobby and socialist anti-prostitution campaigners within the
Council of Europe. Likewise, by continuing to regulate participants in the prostitution
transaction according to the Chinese system of administrative sanctions, as opposed to the
criminal code, the PRC’s response to prostitution can be technically described as
abolitionist, not prohibitionist, in that it aims to penalise those third parties who profit
from and promote the institution of prostitution rather than participants in the
6
prostitution transaction per se (Shan Guangnai 1995:592). What China’s prostitution
laws do not admit are the arguments of the pro-sex work lobby. That is to say, they leave
little space for arguments to the effect that prostitution refers to an unremarkable transaction
between consenting individuals and that laws against ‘consensual, commercial sex acts’
constitute a violation of civil rights.
This does not mean that the PRC’s prostitution controls are unproblematic and cannot
be called into question. The absurdity of making such a claim is highlighted by the fact
that mainland Chinese professionals—whether policing and public health officials,
sociological-sexologists, women’s studies scholars, or researchers for the ACWF—quite
readily admit that the official policy of banning prostitution is imperfect. In fact, domestic
commentators are highly critical of China’s current prostitution controls, with a
consistent focus of complaint being the gender-biased and discriminatory nature of such
controls, as well as the human rights abuses associated with the practice of fining and/or