Prostitution Scandals in China

Elaine Jeffreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136312595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Prostitution Scandals in China presents an examination of media coverage of prostitution-related scandals in contemporary China. It demonstrates that the subject of prostitution is not only widely debated, but also that these public discussions have ramifications for some of the key social, legal and political issues affecting citizens of the PRC. Further, this book shows how these public discussions impact on issues as diverse as sexual exploitation, civil rights, government corruption, child and youth protection, policing abuses, and public health.

In this book Elaine Jeffreys highlights China's changing sexual behaviours in the context of rapid social and economic change. Her work points to changes in the nature of the PRC's prostitution controls flowing from media exposure of policing and other abuses. It also illustrates the emergence of new and legally based conceptions of rightful citizenship in China today, such as children's rights, the right to privacy, work, sex, and health, and the rights of citizens to claim legal redress for losses and injuries experienced as the result of unlawful acts by state personnel.

Prostitution Scandals in China will be of great interest to students and scholars across a range of diverse fields including Chinese culture and society, gender studies and media and communication studies.

1
Prostitution, policing and the media in reform-era China

Perhaps 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 2006a)

This book examines media coverage of prostitution-related scandals in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the late 1990s until the present day. Contrary to the implication of the opening quotation – namely, that government censorship and sensitivity about the burgeoning prostitution industry makes it a taboo topic of media reportage – it highlights the broad range of prostitution-related issues that have been debated in China’s print media and on the Internet. The term ‘scandal’ refers to an action or event that is regarded as morally or legally wrong and causes general public outrage (Concise Oxford Dictionary 2001: 1276–7). A media scandal occurs when actions and events that challenge accepted social values or legal norms are narrativised by the media, producing public discussion of controversial issues with consequences ranging from confirmation of the status quo to changes in public policy (Lull and Hinerman 1997: 3, 28–9). These actions and events acquire additional media currency when signifiers of human difference, such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality and social status, are involved (ibid.: 3). Prostitution is therefore a highly newsworthy topic, especially in the PRC where it is a relatively recent and proscribed, yet rampant, phenomenon.

The present chapter comprises four sections, which provide an overview of the history and development of prostitution in the PRC, the manner of its regulation and the evolution of China’s mass media. It offers the necessary background information for understanding the nexus between these three areas and outlines the organisation of Prostitution Scandals in China: Policing, Media and Society. The first section explains the proclaimed historical absence of prostitution from China of the Maoist period (1949–76), and highlights its rapid expansion throughout the PRC and different sectors of Chinese society following the introduction of market-based economic reforms in 1979. The second section examines the evolution of China’s reform-era prostitution controls and the problematic nature of their enforcement. The third section shows how media coverage of prostitution-related issues in the PRC has altered in ways that reflect both the growth and spread of the sex industry and the changing role of China’s media. The final section introduces the subject matter and conclusions of the other chapters in this book, which examine media coverage of specific actions and events relating to prostitution, including: deceptive recruiting for forced prostitution; youth prostitution; male–male prostitution; penalising male buyers of sex; police corruption; policing excesses; and public health interventions.

An examination of media coverage of prostitution-related scandals demonstrates that prostitution is not only widely debated in present-day China, but also that these public discussions have ramifications for some of the key social, legal and political issues affecting citizens of the PRC. These issues include social vulnerability, sexual exploitation, rule of law, civil rights, sexual rights, government corruption, child and youth protection, policing abuses and public health. More generally, Prostitution Scandals in China: Policing, Media and Society highlights China’s changing sexual behaviours and mores in the context of rapid social and economic change. It points to changes in the nature of the PRC’s prostitution controls flowing from media exposure of policing and other abuses. It also illustrates the emergence of new and legally based conceptions of rightful citizenship in China today, such as children’s rights, the rights of adults to privacy, work, sex and health, and the rights of citizens to claim legal redress for losses and injuries experienced as the result of unlawful acts by state personnel.

Prostitution in reform-era China

Prostitution is a controversial phenomenon and focus of media attention in reform-era China because of its celebrated absence during the Maoist period. In keeping with Marxist theory (Engels 1972), the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) viewed prostitution as an expression of the degraded position of women under feudal-capitalist patriarchy and therefore as incompatible with the goals of building socialism and establishing more equitable socio-sexual relations. Following its assumption of national political power in 1949, the CCP embarked on a series of campaigns that purportedly eradicated the prostitution industry from mainland China by the late 1950s (Jeffreys 2004: 96–7). The extraordinary nature of this feat meant that it was (and is) vaunted as one of the major accomplishments of the communist regime. Indeed, a PRC Government white paper describes it as effecting an ‘earth-shaking historic change in the social status and condition of women’ (Information Office 1994).

Prostitution rates remained extremely low during the Maoist period due to the requirements of socialist, centralised planning that entailed the nationalisation of industry and the curtailing of the monetary economy and population mobility. By 1957, an estimated 90 per cent of China’s urban population belonged to a work unit (danwei), a state-owned enterprise or institution that was meant to overcome the alienation of labour by merging life and work, and which provided all manner of welfare and services for its employees – housing, education, healthcare, policing, consumption goods and entertainment (Bray 2005). The Maoist-era system of allocation, in conjunction with a system of household registration (hukou), created a geographically fixed population that was permanently open to surveillance (Dutton and Lee 1993: 327). Most urban Chinese spent their entire lives in the closed community of a work unit and rural agricultural producers became tied to their place of birth because the state allocated work and major resources, and therefore needed to know the identity and location of its workers.

The comprehensive nature of this system contributed to the absence of visible prostitution in Maoist China by restricting the physical and moral spaces in which such activities could occur. Everyday life in urban China was organised around work and collectivist political movements until the mid-1970s (Dutton 2009: 31–35). Moreover, venues in which individuals could engage in anonymous or private behaviours were highly restricted until the opening up of the PRC’s hospitality and service industry in the late 1980s (Farrer 2008: 5–6; Jeffreys 2004: 174). The Maoist-era system of allocation also ultimately created an entrenched rural–urban divide as urban residents benefited from better access to state welfare and services and rural residents became ‘second-class citizens’ due to their more limited access to education and other opportunities for self-advancement (Feng Xu 2009: 41–44).

The resurgence of prostitution in the PRC consequently is associated with the dramatic changes that have accompanied the nation’s post-1978 adoption of market-based economic reforms and a policy of opening up to the rest of the world. Economic reform has resulted in what some commentators describe as a second industrial revolution, involving the largest internal migration in human history and the wholesale transformation of China’s economy and society (‘The Second Industrial Revolution’ 2004). Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, an estimated 150 million people have migrated from poor rural areas to take up transient work in developing urban centres, primarily in areas relating to the construction of infrastructure and the PRC’s burgeoning hospitality and service industry (Batson 2009: 9). Economic reform has also contributed to the heterogenisation of China’s cities as new residents move in to take up new forms of work, other sectors of the population have become self-employed and newly rich, and a more diversified consumer society has emerged. Although lifting millions of people out of poverty and creating a new class of millionaires (Goodman 2008), one negative effect of these changes has been to create a growing divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (Candelaria et al. 2009: 1–3). Another documented effect has been a massive upsurge in rates and types of prostitution, with the typical ‘sex seller’ being characterised as a young and poorly educated rural migrant worker, although in practice sex sellers come from multiple sectors of Chinese society and include people from privileged backgrounds, tertiary students and government officials (Jeffreys 2004: 97–100, 168–9).

Figures relating to the number of sex sellers in contemporary China vary according to different sources and estimates. In 2009, the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security handled 125,175 cases of selling and buying sex (maiyin, piaochang) (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guojia tongjiju 2010: 890), a figure that includes all those people apprehended for minor prostitution-related offences – first-party sellers and buyers of sex and sometimes third-party facilitators of small-scale and consensual, adult prostitution practices. This figure is conservative because in China, as elsewhere, sex sellers typically evade police apprehension by adopting a strategy of mobility – that is, by moving periodically from one location to another – and (male) consumers of sexual services are generically ‘invisible’ and not targeted by policing activities.

Extrapolating from apprehension statistics, different organisations estimate that between one and 10 million women sell sexual services in China today. A 2009 report by the US Department of State claims that between 1.7 and six million women in the PRC earn their primary income from prostitution, with a further eight to 10 million women occasionally accepting money as well as gifts or rent in exchange for sexual services (US Department of State 2009; see also M. Fan 2007). Estimates by medical researchers focusing on prostitution as a potential bridge for the transmission of sexually transmissible infections (STIs), including the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS), suggest that there are between four and 10 million female sex sellers in China (Li Li et al. 2009).

Expanding on these figures, journalists and academics often cite a Chinese economist, Yang Fan, to claim that there are 20 million sex sellers, whose consumption practices account for more than 6 per cent of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) (French 2006a; Zhong Wei 2000). In Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China, Zheng Tiantian (2009: 66) reiterates these uncorroborated claims to suggest that the contribution of the underground sex industry to China’s GDP in the 2000s may be greater than 12.8 per cent. These estimates are problematic, given the inherent difficulties involved in quantifying the share of GDP constituted by consumption of participants in a black market sector of the economy, on the one hand, and the problem of isolating factors determining the marginal propensity to consume of so variegated a population as female sex sellers, on the other. Nevertheless, they contribute to general understandings that the prostitution industry is an important component of life in present-day China, despite the implementation of police-led crackdowns against it.

Prostitution businesses and practices certainly can be found in a wide variety of places throughout the PRC, incorporating such remote and economically underdeveloped regions as Guizhou and Tibet (‘Xishui piaosu’ 2009; ‘Prostitution thriving’ 2005). Venues for prostitution activities include hotels, bars, karaoke/dance venues, health and fitness clubs, saunas, cinemas, teahouses, foot-washing and hair-washing salons, barbershops, truck stops and temporary work camps. They also include public spaces such as beaches, parks and the unlit spaces beneath overpass bridges (Lin Chunqing et al. 2010: 5–13; Jeffreys 2004: 97–8).

The prices commanded for engaging in the prostitution transaction vary according to location and the nature of supply and demand. Prices range from as little as the cost of a simple meal (10 yuan or less) to several hundred and even several thousand yuan, depending on whether the transaction is negotiated by an individual street operator or through intermediaries in low- or high-grade recreational enterprises (T. Zheng 2009: 85–9; Jeffreys 2004: 98). Prices also vary based on the relative attractiveness of the provider and the socio-economic status of those who demand their services. In China, as in other parts of the world, prostitution is an ageist, classist, racist and sexist industry that offers short-term financial gain for those who use their bodies as sexual capital. Sellers of sexual services are usually women under 40 years of age, and especially between 18 and 22 years of age (Sun Jin et al. 2009). Those who meet certain aesthetic requirements (physically attractive, exotic, educated, cultured and urbane, etc.) earn more than their less ‘attractive’ counterparts, with an individual’s earning capacity generally diminishing rapidly as their age increases (ibid.; see also Fang Xiaoyi et al. 2007; Jeffreys 2004: 168–9).

Buyers of sexual services (usually men aged between 20 and 65 years) pay different rates depending on where they engage in the prostitution transaction, for what reasons and with whom. In China, blue-collar workers are associated in stereotypical fashion with the purchase of quick, cheap sex from poor migrant workers in the streets or in low-grade venues, such as foot-washing salons, massage parlours and barber shops, in order to satisfy natural biological urges or to compensate for emotional stresses (Lin Chunqing et al. 2010: 8). Conversely, private entrepreneurs, bureaucrat-entrepreneurs¹ and government officials (cadres, civil servants and working personnel of the state) are associated with the consumption of sexual services from women of recognisable quality in high-grade venues, often as part of new leisure practices connected with corporate masculinity, and the establishment of business circles and deals (Jeffreys 2008: 240–1; T. Zheng 2006: 2, 182).

Originally restricted chiefly to adult heterosexual prostitution, the market for sexual services in China has expanded to include male–male prostitution, female–male prostitution, youth prostitution and child prostitution. The majority of men who sell male–male sexual services are young, unmarried men between 18 and 24 years of age (Kong 2010: 177; Jeffreys 2007: 163; Cui 2005; Fu Jianfeng 2004). As with their female counterparts, they often have moved from poor communities in the rural hinterland to urban and more developed parts of the PRC to look for work and sometimes to study at college or university. Commonly referred to as money boys, many of these young men reportedly self-identify as heterosexual, but are willing to provide male–male sexual services in exchange for relatively high sums of financial recompense. Others define themselves as bisexual or gay and claim to enjoy experimenting with their sexuality while earning money (Kong 2010: 182; Chapman et al. 2009: 693). At the same time, they express concern over their triply stigmatised identity as homosexuals, rural migrants and sex sellers, and worry about the future because their ability to earn an income from commercial sex is age-related and hence short term (Kong 2010: 180–90). Quick transactions negotiated and conducted on the street command between 10 and 30 yuan, sexual services arranged at or provided in a recreational enterprise command between 50 and 500 yuan, and an overnight stay may command 1,000 yuan (Chapman et al. 2009: 695; Fu Jianfeng 2004). Customers of money boys are middle-aged men from all walks of life, including private entrepreneurs, bureaucrat-entrepreneurs, police officers, university professors and foreign nationals (Ho 2008: 506; Cui 2005).

Men who offer commercial sexual services to women – known in colloquial Chinese as yazi (ducks), after their female counterparts, ji (chickens) – allegedly are growing in numbers too. Media reports based on anecdotal evidence suggest that middle-aged women on holidays from Hong Kong and Taiwan sometimes pay for male companionship and potential sex partners in karaoke/dance venues, as do young mainland Chinese women who desire uncomplicated and/or extramarital sex (Daji Mianshou 2006; Miller 2006). Ethnographic research further suggests that female sex sellers in the Pearl River Delta region sometimes purchase sex from male migrants, both to have ‘fun’ and affirm their higher-class status as someone who can afford to purchase sexual services from a man who sells sex and therefore has a lower social status (Ding Yu 2008: 95–96; M. Fan 2007).

Youth prostitution is another new and controversial phenomenon in reform-era China. Media reports indicate that an increasing number of female university students are selling sexual services in a voluntary capacity to pay for education fees, meet men with money and influence, and augment their social identity by using disposable income to purchase designer clothing and brand-name cosmetics (Chen Jieren 2003a; ‘Farenshenxing’ 2009). Likewise, high-school students aged between 13 and 18 years have sold sexual services via informal friendship networks to affluent private entrepreneurs and government officials aged between 30 and 50 years in high-grade hotels for fees ranging between 2,000 and 20,000 yuan, with virgins commanding especially high prices (Jin Yan et al. 2002; ‘Zhongxuesheng maiyin’ 2002). At the same time, cases involving the forced prostitution of underage girls demonstrate the need for continued, albeit less harsh, governmental controls over criminal aspects of the prostitution industry (‘Guizhou sheng’ 2009). In December 2009, a schoolteacher, Zhao Qingmei, was executed following a failed appeal against a conviction for forcing 22 pupils into repeated acts of prostitution. Six of those pupils were under the age of 14 and thus China’s age of statutory consent (‘Chinese teachers sentenced’ 2007; ‘Woman executed’ 2009).

In short, the growth of China’s prostitution industry since the end of the Maoist period and the entry into the period of economic reform has been rapid and dramatic. Prostitution businesses and practices now exist throughout the length and breadth of the PRC. Moreover, sellers and buyers of sex come from all sectors of society, with a documented growth in recent years of new phenomena such as male–male prostitution and youth prostitution. The continued expansion of China’s prostitution industry inevitably has raised questions about the nature of its policing and legal regulation.

China’s prostitution controls and their critics

The PRC’s first Criminal Law of 1979, effective 1 January 1980, paid limited attention to the subject of prostitution, highlighting the perception at the beginning of the reform period that it was a ‘non-issue’. Article 140 reiterated the PRC’s historical commitment to abolishing the prostitution industry by stipulating that whoever forced women into prostitution should be sentenced to between 3 and 10 years’ imprisonment (Criminal Law of the PRC 1979). Article 169 stated that whoever lured or sheltered women in prostitution for profit should be sentenced to a maximum of 5 years’ imprisonment, with additional provisions for more serious offences. The 1979 Criminal Law banned all third-party attempts to profit from the prostitution of others, but it made no explicit reference to the activities of first-party participants in the prostitution transaction – sex sellers and their clients. Thus China’s legal response to prostitution can be described technically as abolitionist, not prohibitionist, in that the penal code is concerned with penalising those third parties who seek to benefit from the prostitution of others (Jeffreys 2004: 91–2, 106–7).

Policing authorities handled the visible resurgence of prostitution in the mid-1980s primarily under a system of administrative sanctions and not the criminal code. During the Maoist period, the formal legal system fell into disrepute as a tool of class-based oppression and was replaced in part by a system of administrative and Party disciplinary sanctions (Starr 2001: 204–19). This system was used to police the activities of those deemed to have committed social offences or political errors, but whose criminal liability was not considered sufficient to bring them before the courts. Accordingly, the legal control of ‘women who sold sex’ (maiyin funü) and ‘men who bought the services of illicit prostitutes’ (piaosu anchang) was effected on the basis of provincial rulings and localised policing initiatives until the introduction of the ‘Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Administrative Penalties for Public Security’ (1986) (hereafter the 1986 Regulations). Article 30 of the 1986 Regulations, effective 1 January 1987, states that it is forbidden to sell and buy sex, to introduce others into prostitution, and to provide accommodation for the purposes of prostitution. Policing authorities could detain suspected offenders for investigation for a period of up to 15 days, and then give them a warning and order them to make a statement of repentance, and concurrently fine them up to 5,000 yuan. In more serious and repeat cases, policing authorities could detain offenders for rehabilitative education or reform through labour for periods of between 6 months and 2 years.² This meant that the vast majority of prostitution-rel...