Elaine Jeffreys
A 2006 article in the International Herald Tribune claims, somewhat remarkably, that the sex industry is probably the fastest growing industry in China, a situation which ‘ordinarily’ would be ‘grist for all manner of conversation’, from social inequalities to the public health implications and to the need for legal reform. That article concludes, however, that ‘[p]erhaps the most striking feature of China’s booming prostitution industry… is how little ink is expended on it, how seldom its extent is even acknowledged’ (French 2006). This statement invokes popular understandings of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a censorial police state, but this is a far from accurate account of the situation in China today. As I will show, the subject of prostitution and debates about the nature of its regulation are clearly in the public domain.
On 29 July 2010, self-proclaimed sex worker and community activist Ye Haiyan held what was perhaps China’s first street protest in support of sex workers’ rights in Wuhan City. Ye and six other people carried red umbrellas (a symbol of struggles for sex workers’ rights) and handwritten banners stating that sex work is work and should be legal (Netease. com 2010). Ye sent images of the event from her cellphone camera to Global Voices Online, saying that the abuses associated with police-led crackdowns on China’s banned prostitution industry had forced her to take action (Kennedy 2010). She condemned police raids on sex establishments for putting sex workers at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, arguing that many were reluctant to carry condoms for fear police officers would use possession as evidence of engagement in prostitution (Branigan 2010: 15). In blogs and an interview with the Guardian, Ye argued that China should legalise prostitution in order to protect the rights of sex sellers to work and health, and to better control problems such as trafficking for forced prostitution, the prostitution of minors, police malfeasance, and government corruption (Branigan 2010: 15; Netease. com 2010).
Two months earlier, the China Daily, an English-language subsidiary of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, had featured an opinion piece called ‘Debate: Prostitution’, stating that police campaigns against prostitution had sparked debate about the potential benefits of legalisation (Huang and Liu 2010). In the affirmative position, Huang Yingying, Deputy Director of the Institute for Research on Sexuality and Gender at Renmin University, said that there are between three and 10 million women in China of diverse ages selling sexual services, working in different venues at different hours, and for different rates of pay. Although some women choose sex work as a profession, most are forced into the industry by poverty. At the same time, growing numbers of sex workers are moving within and across China’s borders; the sex industry is becoming more urban-based and an increasing number of sex workers and their clients are using drugs such as methamphetamine (‘ice’). While coming from diverse social backgrounds and working in different locations and settings, sex workers in general are vulnerable to violence from clients and get limited help from the police and judiciary because of the illegality of the sex trade. They are also vulnerable to disease because their marginal social position makes it harder to reach them with intensive HIV/AIDS-prevention work. Huang concluded that adult and consensual commercial sex should be legalised, in order to provide sex workers with the right to economic security, and legal and health protections.
In rebuttal, Liu Wenyan, formerly a lawyer with the All-China Women’s Federation and author of Zui yu Fa: Zhongguo Jinchang 20 Nian (Crime and Punishment: Twenty Years of Banning Prostitution in China), said that calls to legalise prostitution are anti-socialist (Huang and Liu 2010; Liu 2007). According to Liu, the sex industry violates women’s rights, engenders crime and corruption, undermines the family, and threatens public health. She concluded that the growth of China’s sex industry stemmed from the failure of local governments to implement adequate preventive measures and from their collusion with criminal rackets.
This chapter examines the emergence of a sex industry in post-1978 China and the evolution of public discussions about it. The first section outlines the proclaimed absence of a prostitution industry in China during the Maoist period (1949—76), and highlights its rapid expansion throughout different sectors of Chinese society following the introduction of market-based economic reforms in 1979. The second section examines the evolution of China’s abolitionist prostitution controls and criticisms of their enforcement. I conclude that there is now widespread debate about the potential benefits of adopting alternative approaches to governing the sex industry.