1 - Introduction

Summary

This chapter introduces the regulation of prostitution in China as a case study of law in everyday life. It presents China’s three tiers of sex workers, the state’s interests in the sex industry, and patterns of prostitution policy implementation. It shows how the study of prostitution and its regulation in China expands our understanding of state–society relations, and of sex work and its regulation across space and time.

It was a fall afternoon in the central square of Xizhou, a red-light district in the city of Shenzhen, in southern China.¹ About two hundred female sex workers were milling around in the square near the hair salons and karaoke bars where they work. Before disappearing into these venues for the night, they were catching up with friends and snacking on grilled corn on the cob, meat skewers, and vegetable stew from neighborhood hawkers. Local government health officials were hard at work in the community, as they usually were at this time of day, and my research assistants and I worked alongside them distributing condoms and safe sex pamphlets to the sex workers in the hopes of later recruiting them to participate in a survey. All of a sudden, the women started running away from the square and into the nearby alleys, vanishing from view. When I looked around to see what was happening, I spotted a van driving slowly around the square. Men inside the van were extending their arms from its sliding door and pulling in women who had not managed to escape in time. When the van came up to me, one of the men, evidently surprised by the presence of a young white woman at the scene, hopped out to inquire about me. Only then did I realize these were undercover police officers – the man had a discreet police patch on his sweater. The neighborhood health officials rushed over to vouch for me, and the officer soon lost interest and drove off with the van full of women.² According to one sex worker who ended up in the van, the police explained that they needed to meet their monthly arrest target for prostitution.³ They brought the women to the local police station, confiscated their cigarettes and cash, held them overnight, and released them the next day.

Over the next two hours, the neighborhood gradually came back to life. Sex workers cautiously returned and went into their karaoke bars and hair salons, and clients trickled in shortly afterward. As night fell over Xizhou, it was back to business as usual until a group of six or seven young men crowded around the table in the square where my research assistants and I were conducting outreach. It quickly became clear that the local sex industry had sent them our way to intimidate us.

Group Head: “What are you doing here? In the future, you’re not allowed to come here.”

My Research Assistant: “We’re here to do health education.”

Group Head: “Fuck health education.”

My Research Assistant: “We’re with the local health bureau.”

Group Head: “Fuck the local health bureau. Finish your stuff up now. If I ever see you here again, I’m going to cream your table into pulp.”⁴

My Research Assistant: “We’ll leave now.”

Group Head: “Fuck you. Get out of here. I’m going to smash all of your stuff into pulp. Don’t let me see you here again.”

We promptly grabbed our belongings, hailed a cab, and left for the night.⁵ When we returned a few days later and recounted our experience to Wang Zhuren, the head of the local health office, he shrugged it off, using the term “youngsters” (小伙子 – xiao huozi) to convey that he viewed these hecklers as harmless. He was used to receiving pushback from the neighborhood sex industry when he carried out testing, training, and outreach programs to reduce HIV/AIDS in the community.⁶ Sex workers, madams, pimps, and managers of the venues where they work are wary of letting the state into their lives and giving it a close look at the illegal activities in which they engage, and do not want it disrupting their regular business operations.

That evening in Xizhou brings to life what this book is about: how the regulation of prostitution shapes the lives of female sex workers, street-level police officers, and frontline public health officials. It is a case study of law in everyday life in China that examines the place of law both within society and within the state, and that also brings to light how dynamics between society and the state unfold on the front lines around the law. Within society, I study how sex workers experience the laws that govern their lives. Within the state, I examine street-level police and public health officials, the individuals who are responsible for implementing the laws and policies that govern sex work in China. I observe how they contend with agency directives handed down from above, and with cross-agency tensions and local political priorities they encounter as they seek to carry out their professional responsibilities. And when sex workers (society) and law enforcement and health officials (the state) encounter each other, I examine the place of law in those dynamics: how those interactions are faithful to the law, how they flout it, and how they often sit somewhere in the middle, selectively mirroring aspects of it while holding others at bay.

Female sex workers in China are usually viewed as either scheming villains who break the law to earn easy money instead of putting in the hard work of the country’s law-abiding citizens, or as innocent victims of broader socioeconomic and political trends that reduce them to engaging in illegal behavior as a last resort. The state is generally perceived as turning a blind eye to China’s thriving sex industry and paying short shrift to the laws that govern it. And considering that female sex workers are among the most marginalized and stigmatized groups within China, an authoritarian state that wields prodigious power over its citizens, it makes sense to expect that whenever government officials do pay attention to sex workers, these interactions will exhibit the overwhelming strength of China’s state and the weakness of its society.

My research, however, belies such broad-brush characterizations of prostitution in China. Instead, it brings to light the multifaceted and nuanced ways in which female sex workers, police officers, and local health officials actually experience China’s prostitution laws and policies. It is based on almost two years of fieldwork in which I placed myself at eye level with sex workers and the street-level bureaucrats responsible for regulating their lives, listening to how they talk about the law and observing how they behave around it amid the swirl of relationships and rules that shape their daily lives. Female sex workers certainly do cower in the face of the state: They fear its law enforcement officers and shy away from its public health programs. But they also engage with the rules and regulations that define the state’s formal interventions into their lives, voice their objections, and push back against perceived injustices. Frontline police and public health officials, for their part, are no angels. They often exert control over sex workers in ways that profoundly violate these women’s rights and dignity. But these officials are not only vessels of authoritarian state strength when they regulate the lives of sex workers. They also struggle to carry out their professional law enforcement and public health responsibilities as they navigate complicated power dynamics that emerge within their agencies, across agencies, and in relation to local political priorities. These challenges highlight the vulnerabilities of these street-level bureaucrats, who can be surprisingly attentive to the concerns of sex workers in the community – catering to them, treading carefully around them, or protecting them from harm. The Regulation of Prostitution in China: Law in the Everyday Lives of Sex Workers, Police Officers, and Public Health Officials tells the story of these experiences.

The Case of Prostitution in China

Prostitution is ubiquitous in contemporary China.⁷ Millions of women sell sex, and millions of men buy it. It is also illegal, and this policy is a reflection of prostitution’s symbolic importance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).⁸ When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it portrayed prostitution as a feudal remnant of the country’s colonial past.⁹ It invested heavily in efforts to eradicate prostitution from society, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CCP was publicly touting its success.¹⁰ In fact, sex work continued in more disguised forms; yet for about three decades, it was remarkably less prevalent and conspicuous in Chinese society.¹¹ This all changed in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping introduced market-based economic reforms and opened China to the outside world, turning the PRC into a Communist-ruled country that fervently embraces capitalism. The pervasiveness of the exchange of sex for money and material goods powerfully embodies this deeply ironic ideological contradiction within Chinese society today. On a less theoretical level, prostitution has played a pivotal role in a public health crisis in China – HIV/AIDS, which expanded from high-risk groups to the population at large through sex workers, clients, and their other sexual partners.¹²

State Interests in the Sex Industry

Sex work challenges the Chinese state in three different domains: policing, public health, and commerce. From the perspective of law enforcement, it violates anti-prostitution laws. It also makes it difficult to maintain order in a community, as areas with a high concentration of sex work and entertainment venues that harbor it attract large numbers of unruly and often inebriated clients. Sex workers are also at heightened risk of falling victim to crimes such as robbery, rape, and murder. And when they are coerced to engage in prostitution, it becomes an issue of sex trafficking. The country’s sex industry is also associated with drug use and drug trafficking.¹³ In short, prostitution and its associated activities present a variety of threats to public order and social stability that fall within the purview of police responsibilities.

The Chinese state also treats prostitution as a public health issue. Since 2003, the PRC has publicly recognized the threat that HIV/AIDS presents in the country and acknowledges the role that prostitution plays in increasing the virus’ prevalence within the population. Sexual transmission is now the primary mode of HIV/AIDS infection in China, and infection rates among sex workers are as high as 10 percent in some places.¹⁴ Public health officials monitor rates of HIV/AIDS infection among sex workers. They carry out trainings to educate these women about HIV/AIDS transmission. They promote condom use within this population and also mandate that condoms be publicly visible and available for purchase in all entertainment venues and hotels. They support voluntary counseling and treatment for HIV/AIDS patients and provide free antiretroviral treatments for them. HIV education campaigns also target the general population, in efforts to reach potential clients. Similar efforts extend to monitoring other sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, which also present a public health threat in China.

Lastly, the Chinese state regulates commercial aspects of the sex industry. Work culture in China revolves around a vast entertainment industry – including karaoke bars and clubs – that plays a crucial role in professional networking and business negotiations, and that represents an important contributor to economic growth. Prostitution lies at the heart of this phenomenon: Sex workers are integral to the entertainment that occurs in these spaces. The actual exchange of money for sex between clients and sex workers contributes only minimally to the economic growth that comes from the entertainment industry. Instead, it is expenditures such as food, drink, and room rentals that generate important amounts of revenue, which benefits the state through taxation of entertainment venues and their employees. Importantly, for a state where sex work is against the law, this taxation regime applies to the services that these registered businesses provide that are legal (such as food, drink, and room rentals), rather than the prostitution that they harbor; it is not a policy that officially legalizes and formally taxes the exchange of sex for money. Places with a thriving entertainment industry also provide employment opportunities for China’s vast migrant population and attract investment. One study found that the national sex trade was worth 1 trillion yuan (about $157 billion) annually and another estimated that it contributes 6 to 12 percent of China’s GDP.¹⁵ In Dongguan, a city in southern China renowned for prostitution, the sex industry is estimated to generate about 10 percent of the local GDP.¹⁶ The accuracy of these figures is not easy to verify. Yet it is undeniable that the entertainment industry is an important contributor to the local GDP throughout urban China, and that it falls apart without the promise of sex that it presents to all its patrons.

The state’s three approaches to prostitution – policing, public health, and commerce – are frequently in tension with one another. Policing policies lead sex workers to shy away from the state and hide their involvement in prostitution, for fear of arrest. Yet to work effectively, health policies require sex workers to disclose that they sell sex and to proactively seek health care. Commercial regulations, meanwhile, are designed to allow the state to benefit from a thriving sex industry. Law enforcement regulations, by contrast, aim to reduce the occurrence of prostitution in society. It is these tensions that shape the daily policy implementation choices of police officers and health workers. They lie behind the many permutations that characterize how local officials interact with each other and the sex industry, and that I bring to light in this book.

Tiers of Sex Workers

In this introduction thus far, I have focused on female sex workers as one group, united by a shared livelihood: exchanging sex for money or other material goods. Yet China, like every society, includes multiple markets for sex, and the characteristics of prostitution and the experience of its regulation vary widely across each market. In the lowest tier, sex workers solicit on the streets and in brothels, which are often thinly disguised as hair salons and massage parlors, and signal the services they actually provide with glowing red lights in the windows. These venues tend to lack sinks, scissors, and other tools generally found in legitimate beauty parlors. Sex is the only service provided in this lowest tier of the sex industry. In the middle tier, karaoke bar and club “hostesses” (三陪小姐 – sanpei xiaojie) drink, dance, and talk with guests. In addition to these services, all of which are legal, they also sell sex. In the top tier of the sex industry, “mistresses” (情妇 – qingfu) and “second wives” (二奶 – ernai) entertain businessmen and government officials.¹⁷ Clients in this category provide housing and generous living allowances to these kept women, and may even have children with them. Neighborhoods in some cities have such a high concentration of this type of sex worker that they are called “second wife villages” (二奶村 – ernaicun).

These three categories encompass the major types of activities and spaces associated with female sex work in China.¹⁸ They also reflect how actors in the sex industry talk about different types of prostitution. The women whose experiences inform this study were quick to articulate the differences between selling sex on the street/in small brothels, hustling for clients every evening at a karaoke bar, and being a kept woman whose life revolves around the whims and wishes of one man. Clients also talk about the differences between soliciting sex on the streets/in small brothels, in karaoke venues, and maintaining a mistress or second wife. This approach to categorizing female sex workers in China also largely overlaps with how state actors who regulate the sex industry perceive these women. The police recognize a hierarchy of prostitution in their community, from streetwalkers to second wives and mistresses.¹⁹ China’s public health policies classify female sex workers according to a three-tiered hierarchy.²⁰ Given their focus on groups at greatest risk of HIV/AIDS, public health officials do not explicitly include mistresses and second wives in their categorization.²¹

Some may question whether prostitution encompasses this top tier of women. Second wives might reject this characterization of their situation (particularly if they have never engaged in other types of prostitution), and some of their clients would likely concur. Yet the arrangements between second wives and the men who support them fall comfortably within the bounds of the prevailing definition of prostitution as “the exchange of sex or sexual services for money or other material benefits.”²² In fact, women who move back and forth between positions as hostesses and kept women clearly view these two arrangements on a spectrum. Other academics who study the sex industry in China also view second wives as engaging in prostitution.²³ This issue begs the question of whether marriage should then also be considered a type of sex work – a position that some feminist theorists uphold.²⁴ While some sex workers in China do place marriage on the spectrum of prostitution,²⁵ that was not the predominant view among the women whose stories inform these pages. In addition, the state does not view marriage this way and regulates it separately from prostitution.

Tiers often feature prominently in research on female sex work. The categories that scholars delineate and highlight may differ – not only due to differences across space and time but even within a given society, depending on the research question.²⁶ For instance, I structure my study primarily around the streetwalker/brothel worker–hostess–mistress categorization described earlier in this section of the chapter. Yet these three categories can be further dissected to reveal additional within-group distinctions,²⁷ and scholars such as Tiantian Zheng and Suowei Xiao have produced rich and insightful studies focused on such within-tier differences of China’s sex industry.²⁸ While some of these within-tier differences surface in the pages that follow, they are secondary to the broader streetwalker/brothel worker–hostess–mistress categories around which I structure my study. As described in the ensuing chapters, it is largely these broader tiers that shape how sex workers experience the state in China. In short, while research on sex work may not all call for the same tier-based emphasis, a shared understanding of the deep importance of tiers weaves throughout analyses of this phenomenon.²⁹

Patterns of Tier-Based Policy Implementation

Tiers of sex workers and types of state interventions provide the building blocks of this book. Part II recounts the everyday lives of female sex workers in the different tiers of prostitution. Part III focuses on the experiences and policy implementation decisions of police officers and health officials within these tiers of sex work. Unsurprisingly, many of the practices of these street-level bureaucrats diverge from the formal letter of the law, including the two predominant tier-based patterns of policy implementation that police officers and health officials adopt on the ground.

First, while all prostitution is against the law in China, low-tier female sex workers bear the brunt of the state’s policing attention. In this respect, China looks remarkably similar to many other parts of the world. For instance, Elizabeth Bernstein describes how in San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Stockholm, law enforcement practices have focused on getting rid of visible evidence of prostitution – streetwalkers – while finding ways to allow it to thrive behind closed doors.³⁰ Prabha Kotiswaran uncovers a similar pattern in India. Prostitution is formally criminalized in the country, but Kotiswaran’s fieldwork instead uncovers “indifference towards indoor sex work and extensive crackdowns on street-based sex work.”³¹ Indeed, “the enforcement of the anti-sex work law in Sonagachi [a red-light district in the city of Kolkata] is astonishingly similar to what Bernstein describes for San Francisco.”³² In recent years, a growing body of literature has sought to reflect upon policing practices across political regime types with an eye toward nuanced consideration of concepts such as “authoritarian” and “democratic” policing and how they emerge (or not) in different areas of law enforcement.³³ With respect to the issue of sex work, close-to-the-ground attention to tier-based implementation in China helps to illuminate similarities of policing practices across regime type.

Second, while China’s sex work public health policies underscore the importance of attending to low-tier sex workers, as they are at greatest risk of HIV/AIDS, public health officials instead focus their outreach efforts disproportionally on hostesses. On one level, these street-level bureaucrats struggle to access sex workers who are most in need of health interventions, which resonates with the experiences of colleagues working in any place where prostitution is against the law. For instance, the most vulnerable sex workers everywhere hesitate to engage with the state when the threat of arrest hovers over them.³⁴ Yet the difficulties that Chinese health officials face in their work also point to challenges of conducting health outreach that are specific to an authoritarian regime. Transparency is not the CCP’s strong suit. For Chinese health officials, this means that they have much to lose and little to gain from reporting accurate rates of HIV/AIDS among sex workers in the community if those rates are high. This political reality makes hostesses attractive targets for HIV/AIDS testing, since they bring rates down, and also lies behind other deviations from formal rules that have alarming public health consequences.

State–Society Relations in China

Prostitution is not the lens scholars typically use to make sense of how the state and society experience and engage with one another in contemporary China. Most research on state–society relations in China focuses on citizens such as workers or peasants who may challenge the state but who also form the CCP’s bedrock of legitimacy.³⁵ In contrast, sex workers represent what the party stands against ideologically. Indeed, when the CCP sought to eradicate prostitution after coming to power in 1949, it referred to prostitution as “a sequel to the savage and bestial system of former exploiters and power holders to ruin the spirit and the body of women and to tarnish their dignity.”³⁶ Female sex workers are considered the dregs of Chinese society. The challenges and stigma they face can differ depending on whether they are soliciting a poor migrant man on the streets or living as a kept woman for an elite client. Yet in most cases, sex workers are poor female migrants who are both breaking the law and engaging in behavior that China’s state and society condemn on moral grounds. In a country whose citizens all occupy precarious positions vis-à-vis the state, these characteristics of sex workers place them among the very weakest in society.

Logistically speaking, there is a good reason why we do not know a lot about how sex workers experience the state in China. Fieldwork is never easy in the country, and accessing individuals who engage in illegal behavior only complicates the task; all the more so when they are being asked to talk about the state. Yet there is also a substantive reason why more respectable members of society attract greater attention from scholars. A question that lies at the core of much research on contemporary politics and law in China is what we can learn about the stability of the CCP and possibilities for political change. It makes sense to search for answers in places that hold the most promise: among communities of individuals who seem best situated to push back against the state in ways that might leave a mark. Ordinary workers and peasants – who benefit from multiple forms of political, legal, and moral legitimacy in contemporary China – are obvious candidates.³⁷ Lawyers are also attractive objects of academic attention – since litigation can be a powerful source of social change, it makes sense to pay attention to these societal elites who can challenge the state through the legal system.³⁸ It helps that all of these high-status individuals regularly make themselves heard through protests and lawsuits. Such public manifestations of displeasure have a strong pull on researchers looking for instances of state–society contestation. In comparison, female sex workers hardly stand out as a community of interest to scholars who care about societal dissatisfaction as a source of pressure on the state. Women who sell sex in China are illegitimate in multiple ways that give the state and, by extension, students of politics and law little reason to view them as particularly threatening, a view bolstered by the observation that they only rarely voice their grievances publicly. But Joel Migdal reminds us that social forces are “often low-profile or even invisible,”³⁹ and female sex workers embody this characterization more than the groups that have previously been the object of research on state–society relations in China. In short, by focusing on how female sex workers experience and think about the state in China, I bring forth a story that has previously been overlooked in favor of communities that provide more low-hanging fruit to scholars who care about political change.

Yet it should come as no surprise that female sex workers have plenty to say about how they experience the state, and that it shapes their behavior in innumerable ways. Researchers who care about power, politics, and law have long seen the value in examining what Michel de Certeau calls “tales of the unrecognized,”⁴⁰ and, in the words of James Scott, bringing to light their “hidden transcripts.”⁴¹ Likewise, Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey urge us to seek out the “often unseen and unrecognized practices of the weak against the strong.”⁴² Doing so is important for understanding tensions between the state and society, because open confrontations are rare; instead, “most of the political struggle of subordinate groups is conducted in more ambiguous territory.”⁴³ Scholars of China’s upstanding citizens know this well. For instance, Diana Fu finds that labor organizations affect how individuals “think and talk about their rights in a fundamental way that constitutes a core element of political change.”⁴⁴ And Rachel Stern steers us away from a search for “signs of major transitions” to instead “remain attuned to changes that leave the top leadership largely untouched,” as “the steady pressure of litigation can rework the legal system from within.”⁴⁵ These studies show the value of looking for subtle challenges to the state in hidden spaces, and I find the same to be true among a population that is much more marginalized in Chinese society.

More importantly, the possibility that challenges to authority that occur behind closed doors may presage larger political shifts is not necessary to justify inquiry into sex worker experiences of state power. Instead, there is intrinsic value in seeking out and bringing forth the voices of the most oppressed. Ultimately, the sex worker narratives that I share in this book deserve attention because they are too often silenced, and glossing over them contributes to the continued marginalization of this population. As Ewick and Silbey observe with respect to the expressions of resistance of ordinary people in the United States, “[r]egardless of their political significance … [they] stand as important in their own right … [t]o ignore [them] … because they are momentary and private is to reinscribe the relations of power they oppose.”⁴⁶ This observation holds even greater weight with respect to female sex workers in authoritarian China today.

Turning to the state, my examination of the regulation of sex work considers separately its different interests in prostitution: policing, public health, and commercial. It also focuses on the experiences and practices of state actors responsible for implementing policies on the ground and remains attuned to how their behaviors compare to the formal letter of the law. Political scientists sometimes call this a disaggregated approach to understanding the state, an approach that eschews its reification and instead takes as a starting point the observation that “the state speaks with many, contradictory voices.”⁴⁷ When I look at one issue area – prostitution – and tease out the different types of state policies and agencies that have a stake in its regulation, I am disaggregating the state horizontally. And when I examine separately the intentions of the central government and the practices of its local officials, I am disaggregating it vertically. Research on the Chinese state has long demonstrated the value in taking these dimensions seriously.

In some instances, such studies are primarily situated within the state, focused on bureaucratic politics and questions of fragmented authoritarianism.⁴⁸ I add to them a focus on the very frontlines of the state: the street-level bureaucrats (police officers and health officials) who are implementing policy on the ground.⁴⁹ Suzanne Scoggins places herself there for her study of police officers in China.⁵⁰ Yet we know less about interagency dynamics at this local level of analysis, and my account of how health officials and police officers contend with one another and the economic interests of the local government around a specific issue area – prostitution – speaks to that aspect of interactions within the state. In addition, we know that China’s street-level officials, like their colleagues in other parts of the world,⁵¹ have significant discretion in their professional lives.⁵² Yet we know less about what they do with that autonomy, particularly beyond the area of stability maintenance.⁵³ Scoggins paints a portrait of local police officers as too under-resourced and overburdened to take advantage of their discretion.⁵⁴ When it comes to regulating the sex industry, such pressures certainly weigh heavily on police officers, as well as on their health official colleagues. Yet the street-level bureaucrats I observed nevertheless – indeed, by necessity – make use of their independence to engage in numerous creative strategies to fulfill aspects of their professional responsibilities.

In other instances, studies of Chinese politics that are committed to a disaggregated view of the state are more attuned to societal experiences with the state.⁵⁵ The weight I place on how female sex workers think, talk, and act in relation to the regulations that govern their lives and the street-level officials who enforce them places me squarely in this tradition. Yet as noted earlier, female sex workers are more marginalized than the societal groups other scholars interested in the state in contemporary China have studied. A close look at how health officials and police officers interact with sex workers reveals plenty of unsurprising behavior, considering the power dynamics involved – such as forced HIV/AIDS testing, arbitrary detention, physical abuse, and extraction of bribes and free sexual services. Yet it also reveals the weakness of these street-level bureaucrats. For instance, local health officials struggle to conduct outreach to the sex industry, which is averse to public health interventions. These state workers frequently find themselves trying to cajole their way into communities of sex workers, with limited alternatives when the door remains shut. And local law enforcement officers expend considerable effort on maintaining open lines of communication with members of the sex industry, requesting sex workers to lay low at certain times, urging them to reach out for assistance when they face harm, and providing them with the tools to do so. We know that on the front lines, even members of one of China’s most powerful bureaucracies – the police – are weak when it comes to issues of everyday order maintenance.⁵⁶ Observing interactions between health and law enforcement officials on the one hand, and sex workers on the other, underscores just how weak these state actors are, even in relation to some of the lowest-standing members of society. These interactions bring to light the choices, strategies, and effort that the precarity of street-level bureaucrats entails, and the unexpected dependence of frontline officials upon a cooperative sex industry to fulfill their professional responsibilities.

The Dual State

A key characteristic of the state that emerges from disaggregating it to understand the regulation of prostitution in China is the street-level bureaucrat’s independence and vulnerability. Yet China’s patterns of prostitution-related law enforcement also speak to another approach to understanding state–society relations in the country – the dual state.⁵⁷ This concept identifies the coexistence of two systems of justice in authoritarian regimes: one for ordinary problems and another for political challenges.⁵⁸ With specific attention to law enforcement, the concepts of “low policing” (which concerns everyday crime control) and “high policing” (which focuses on explicitly political issues that pose a direct challenge to the state) encapsulate a similar bifurcation.⁵⁹ The policing of sex work in China generally falls under the sphere of ordinary issues and low policing, and that is the space occupied by the struggling street-level bureaucrat. Yet the CCP can also pull prostitution out of that realm and into the world of high-level politics. Specifically, when the party seeks to orchestrate the downfall of elites who challenge the CCP’s legitimacy through egregious corruption, public criticism, or blatant flouting of major directives, the individual’s engagement in prostitution becomes one of the allegations publicly used to cement his demise.

The recognition that dual systems of justice coexist within an authoritarian regime is immensely valuable for providing nuanced accounts of how its state and society interact.⁶⁰ And it makes sense to reflect upon the types of actions and issues that fall more easily into the worlds of the “ordinary” or the “political.” For instance, private law in China is generally considered to operate relatively unfettered by the state, in contrast to the regulation of the media, religion, and ethnic affairs.⁶¹ When I underscore that the exchange of sex for money or other material goods is present in both realms of the bifurcated state, I also draw attention to the limits inherent in sorting specific behaviors into these two realms. The line between an ordinary issue in China and a political one is often blurry,⁶² and the CCP does this by design. One of the greatest tools that an authoritarian state has at its disposal is its ability to obfuscate the boundaries of the permissible so that its citizens are left guessing as to how their actions will be received.⁶³ Elites who fall from grace may have forgotten that no one is immune to this defining characteristic of the regime, as the CCP turns the purchase of sex – an illegal but widespread behavior – into prime evidence of its target’s misdeeds.

Human Relationships

My approach to understanding state–society relations in China – immersion in the daily lives of both state officials and members of society, including in the spaces where those lives intersect – also underscores the central role that human relationships play in these dynamics. Many studies have emphasized the importance of relationships, or guanxi (关系), for understanding a wide array of issues relevant to the social scientific study of China.⁶⁴ What I highlight here is less of a culturally specific, and more of a universal, reflection on connections between human beings. At the heart of state–society relations lie the actual interactions that occur between an individual who represents the state and a member of society. If we disaggregate the state and society all the way down to their smallest units of analysis, we arrive at a human-to-human exchange. This observation came alive to me powerfully when I would sit back and watch daily life unfold in Xizhou, the location of this chapter’s opening anecdote. In the late afternoon, a scene would unfold where local government actors, sex workers, pimps, and other members of the community would all commingle in the central square. Middle and high school boys would be playing a basketball game on one half of the square’s court, while members of the neighborhood government association (居委会 – juweihui) would start their own game on the court’s other half. Right next to the basketball court, a group of retirees would assemble for ballroom dancing, with music blasting from their boombox. Sex workers would sit on the steps in front of their venues or huddle in small groups in the square, chatting with friends. Children returning home from school would stream through the square, stopping for snacks from the food stand vendors, and weave their way around the dancers, the basketball players, and the sex workers. These disparate groups sometimes seemed like they were leading unrelated lives while superimposed onto a shared physical space. Yet they also recognized one another’s presence and would enter into dialogue with each other. When I stood outside one afternoon watching the two basketball games with Chen Ge, a pimp running a low-tier mom-and-pop brothel, Wang Zhuren, a local health official, came over from his nearby office to watch also. They struck up conversation, starting with a discussion of the pros and cons of legalizing prostitution in China, before moving on to evaluating the basketball skill levels of various players on the court – two individuals simply chitchatting on a sunny day. Both directly and indirectly, most pages of this book bear witness to such encounters. They remind us that as human beings, we share certain ways of connecting with each other that transcend the roles we might play within the state or society and, beyond that, even the impact that borders can have on our lives.

Gender

Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned two explanations for why previous studies of state–society relations in China have overlooked female sex workers – they are hard to find, and not the most likely candidates to shed light on political change. There is also a third reason: Prostitution is generally studied within disciplines and subdisciplines that place gender and sexuality at the heart of their intellectual inquiry. Sociologists and anthropologists often conduct research on this topic,⁶⁵ and political and legal scholarship on sex work is often framed in terms of gender politics and feminist legal theory – subfields that are not at the center of political science and law.⁶⁶ Social science work that situates itself primarily outside of those gender and sexuality-focused realms of academia, including inquiries into dynamics between the state and society and questions of regulation and its implementation, tends not to consider that the study of prostitution can provide insight into issues other than gender and sexuality.

A number of studies prior to mine have contributed to correcting this imbalance. For instance, Elizabeth Remick situates her study of the regulation of prostitution in the early decades of the twentieth century in China around questions of statebuilding,⁶⁷ and Samantha Majic locates her research on sex worker health-service organizations in the Bay Area in the 2000s in the literature on social movements.⁶⁸ Reactions to these efforts, and to my research, show how much work remains to legitimize the study of prostitution outside the realms of gender and sexuality. On the one hand, scholars within these subfields of gender and sexuality have called out these projects for neglecting the gendered realities of prostitution in the process of emphasizing other theoretical approaches to the issue.⁶⁹ On the other hand, mainstream political science and legal academia still struggle to understand prostitution as a serious area of inquiry that can enrich those disciplines.

It is not unreasonable to expect a study of female sex workers in China to explicitly address questions of gender and the state in contemporary China. After all, the CCP demonstrates deep tension around the issue. Gender equality is one of the ideological pillars of the CCP, encapsulated in the saying “Women hold up half the sky,” attributed to Mao Zedong. At the same time, the party’s actual treatment of women is dismal. The state urges young, educated urban women to focus less on their careers and more on getting married, lest they become “leftover” women, doomed to a life of being single and lonely.⁷⁰ It cracks down, brutally, on its feminist activists.⁷¹ It approaches divorce in ways that disproportionately favor husbands over wives.⁷² And those are all women with higher standing than sex workers. This book is replete with evidence of the deeply gendered inequality that characterizes how China regulates prostitution. For instance, it is female sex workers, rather than their male clients, who bear the brunt of the regulations that outlaw prostitution, despite formal rules that hold them both responsible. Yet the problem with the expectation that a study of prostitution will address questions of gender is the double standard that it reveals. No one expects studies of elite politics in China to place gender front and center in their analyses. Perhaps they should. As of the 20th National Congress of the CCP in 2022, no woman has ever been a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the most powerful political body in China.⁷³ That same event also presented an all-male Politburo (the larger and second-most powerful body), and before 2022 only six women had ever been full members of the Politburo.⁷⁴ That questions of gender are often the first to emerge in reaction to a study on the regulation of prostitution, and at best an afterthought when reflecting on CCP leadership, is indicative both of the need for more studies on sex work that do not situate themselves primarily in questions of gender and sexuality and of the importance of asking more questions about gender in spaces where such discussion is absent.⁷⁵

Transnational Influences

Lastly, no account of what sex work teaches us about state–society relations in contemporary China is complete without a reflection on transnational influence, which affects both how the state regulates prostitution as a public health issue and how some sex workers experience prostitution and the state’s interventions in their lives. The global public health community has shaped both the content of China’s prostitution health policies (which reflect international best practices) and the health officials who administer them (and who approach the issue of sex work with transnational language and ideas). Yet street-level bureaucrats in China veer far from these transnational ideals when implementing public health policies, in ways that are harmful to both sex workers and the general public. Strikingly, the same international health community that has invested heavily in creating a domestic health infrastructure in China to its liking is noticeably disengaged from the realities of local implementation. Like many others who study how global policies intersect with local realities, I identify a deep and alarming disconnect between the intentions of transnational actors and what actually happens on the ground.⁷⁶

Yet the news is not all bleak. Most research that examines linkages between global actors and local society is attuned to the effects of transnational ideas and practices on societal elites.⁷⁷ The international community seeks them out due to ease of access, which, in a country such as China, includes being located in Beijing and speaking English.⁷⁸ My focus on some of China’s most downtrodden citizens expands the horizon: It reveals a smattering of poor, uneducated migrants, whose daily lives are not enmeshed in international communities, but who nevertheless speak the language of the global sex worker rights movement, and whose consciousness has been powerfully transformed by its ideas. This observation shows transnational influence taking root in places far removed from the surface where it is usually sought out.

And while I identify the transnational ideas that have made their mark on prostitution in China, one element of international concern is conspicuously absent from this book: the concept of sex trafficking. In the United States, it is difficult to talk about sex work without also talking about sex trafficking, in large part due to the abolitionist movement that has sought to reframe all prostitution as trafficking.⁷⁹ That movement has powerfully shaped not only how the US government approaches the issue of prostitution domestically but also how it engages with the issue internationally.⁸⁰ In India, for instance, global trafficking narratives play a pivotal role in shaping debates about the regulation of sex work, and the United States has influenced prostitution law reform efforts in the country.⁸¹ Sex trafficking, in the sense of nonconsensual participation in the sex industry, certainly occurs in China, and I highlight the instances when I encountered trafficking narratives in my fieldwork. In addition, concern for trafficking and policy attention to it are on the rise in China.⁸² Yet the issue does not dominate conversations about prostitution in the way it has in the United States or India. Indeed, the concept of sex trafficking rarely came up during my fieldwork, either within communities of sex workers or in interactions with state actors, as I asked about their everyday experiences with the implementation of prostitution regulations. In short, my book is not about sex trafficking because that global narrative did not weave its way into the trenches of the state, society, and the regulation of prostitution in China under Hu Jintao.⁸³

Prostitution and Its Regulation

In addition to its contributions to our understanding of state–society relations in China, this book also builds on, and informs, scholarship on sex work and its regulation. In particular, it engages with other studies on sex work in contemporary China and Chinese history, as well as sociolegal studies of sex work in other countries.

Research on contemporary China has a lot to say about female sex work. Sexologist Pan Suiming pioneered the study of sex and sexuality in China, and has carried out an abundance of studies of female sex workers since he started his research on sexual attitudes and behaviors in post-Mao China in the 1980s.⁸⁴ Anthropologist Tiantian Zheng studies the nexus of prostitution, masculinity, power, and the state through an ethnography centered around three karaoke bars (high-, middle-, and low-tier) in the city of Dalian.⁸⁵ Anthropologist Yeon Jung Yu studies how social networks influence the lives of female sex workers.⁸⁶ Sociologist Suowei Xiao examines how second wives and their clients enter into such relationships in search of dignity, distinction, and belonging, focused on both rural and urban women, and worker and business-elite men.⁸⁷ Sociologist Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang examines questions of intimacy, masculinity, and criminal justice through an ethnography of low-end, mid-tier, and high-end female sex workers and their clients in the southern city of Dongguan.⁸⁸ Susanne Y. P. Choi, also in sociology, has explored issues tied to agency and victimhood of female sex workers,⁸⁹ and Choi’s work with Ruby Y. S. Lai examines questions of stigma.⁹⁰ Public health researchers have carried out a wealth of studies on female sex workers in China, focused largely on their health and sexual behaviors.⁹¹ Through detailed documentary and textual analysis, political scientist and sinologist Elaine Jeffreys analyzes academic and administrative discourses on female prostitution in China to underscore their methodological and political biases, considering the policing of prostitution in China as a practice of Foucauldian governmentality.⁹² Legal scholar Sarah Biddulph’s study of administrative detention powers in China, rooted in a comprehensive analysis of relevant laws, policies, and other official pronouncements, includes a focus on prostitution and on custody and education centers for sex workers and clients.⁹³

This overview of some of the main research on female sex workers in contemporary China reveals that the disciplines of politics and law have rarely turned their attention to contemporary prostitution in China. When they have, it has been through documentary and textual analysis, rather than through the methodologies that lie at the heart of this book: ethnography, interviews, and surveys.

Against this backdrop, I extend the study of female sex work in contemporary China to place a different question at the heart of my analysis: How is sex work regulated on the front lines? While both Biddulph and Jeffreys examine the formal policing policies that govern prostitution, I instead focus on the actual implementation of prostitution regulations through the experiences of both sex workers and frontline state actors. Furthermore, I examine the regulation of prostitution not only from the perspective of law enforcement but also from the angle of public health. In contrast to the public health literature on this topic, which is interested mainly in sex worker sexual behavior and disease infection rates, I focus on how health regulators carry out their responsibilities, and how sex workers experience that regulation. In addition, I place the interplay between these two state interests and a third – economic growth – at the heart of my analysis, to examine how it shapes both the behavior of street-level bureaucrats and the experiences of female sex workers.

Although I have few fellow travelers in the study of the regulation of sex work in contemporary China, I am extending a rich literature on the regulation of prostitution in Chinese history. Historian Matthew Sommer, in his analysis of the late Imperial era policies on sexuality, shows how prostitution was regulated differently based on the status of the individuals involved.⁹⁴ These distinctions were enshrined within the judicial codes of successive dynasties until the early eighteenth century, and legal case records provide ample evidence of their enforcement. In Imperial times, the law clearly articulated status differences in prostitution. In fact, the entire purpose of the policies was to maintain barriers between social strata and restrict certain practices to their proper place. In contrast, current prostitution policing policies do not formally differ according to the social standing of the individuals involved and make no official distinction between sexual transactions negotiated on the streets for a couple of yuan, and those that occur behind the closed doors of elite entertainment venues for thousands more. It is only in their implementation that these laws reinforce status distinctions. Political scientist Elizabeth Remick examines the regulation of prostitution in Late Qing and Republican China (1900–1937) and its connections to local processes of statebuilding.⁹⁵ In bringing to light different models used to control prostitution locally, Remick shows how some official class categorizations of prostitution persisted in the Republican era. For instance, police-run brothels in the city of Kunming clearly identified brothels as low, middle, or high class, where a woman’s age and beauty appeared to determine the class to which police assigned her.⁹⁶ Historian Gail Hershatter’s study of the lives of female sex workers in Shanghai, starting in the late nineteenth century, also includes an examination of how prostitution is regulated, and class is central to her analysis.⁹⁷ Christian Henriot similarly devotes a section of his book to regulation, and maps out the different types of sex workers in Shanghai from the mid nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries.⁹⁸

It is never easy to capture the voices of marginalized individuals and groups within society. Researchers who study the past face the particular challenge of how to do so when those people are no longer around to speak their truths. Remick states upfront that limitations of sources prevented her from examining sex worker experiences with the regulation of prostitution in their lives.⁹⁹ Instead, she emphasizes the perspective of the state. Sommer has more luck: The legal case records that serve as the principal source for his study include records of witness testimony that, despite not being verbatim transcripts, are “evidence of an ethnographic nature … [that is] as close as we will ever get to the ‘voice’ of the illiterate in late imperial China.”¹⁰⁰ The use of legal case records also means that Sommer is telling a story about how sex is regulated focused on moments when individuals have formally encountered the legal system. They are, in the words of sociologists of law Richard Miller and Austin Sarat, firmly located toward the top of “the dispute pyramid.”¹⁰¹ What slips through the cracks is a view of how individuals experience and understand the law in their daily lives, when they are not entangled with formal legal institutions: what the sociolegal scholars Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey call “the common place of law.”¹⁰² In contrast to Sommer’s use of legal case records and in line with “the common place of law,” Hershatter and Henriot’s sources allow them to provide us with a view of law in the everyday lives of female sex workers in Shanghai, albeit not directly through their voices. Indeed, Henriot notes that he wrote his study “with the explicit purpose of retelling the history of Chinese prostitutes for themselves, though rarely by themselves and most often through the ‘voice’ of others.”¹⁰³ And while Hershatter also notes that the historical record “is not spoken in the voice of the prostitute,”¹⁰⁴ she also shows how they “nevertheless left an audible trace.”¹⁰⁵ For instance, she notes that Shanghai papers reported streetwalker arrests and court testimonies and shows how such records “let us glimpse not only the circumstances that brought these women to prostitution, but also the regulatory regimes of the local government and the way that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could from the legal system.”¹⁰⁶

As a scholar of contemporary Chinese law and politics, I was able to hear what female sex workers have to say for themselves. Although the voices of sex workers are not the only sources I use, their words grace many pages of this book. Thus, simply by nature of the fact that I study and learn from people who are still alive, my examination of the regulation of prostitution in China is much more firmly ensconced in society than these historical projects. Of course, the use of sex worker testimony raises many questions: Which sex worker voices does a foreign, white woman hear when she is doing research in an authoritarian country where prostitution is against the law? Which are obscured? To what extent do those voices accurately reflect the lived experiences of their speakers, and how do they instead present distortions of such realities? I address these questions in the appendix of this book.

Lastly, there is a rich and multidisciplinary literature on prostitution outside of China. It includes a wealth of research on the contemporary regulation of prostitution focused on formal rules, regulations, and official policy approaches, methodologically akin to the Jeffreys and Biddulph studies of China mentioned earlier in this chapter,¹⁰⁷ and many historical studies of the regulation of prostitution.¹⁰⁸ Very little of this research focuses primarily on the lived experiences of regulation among both sex workers and frontline state actors, as I do. That said, studies by Prabha Kotiswaran and Rohit De – both set in India – resonate strongly with mine, as they also place law in the everyday lives of sex workers at the heart of their research.

Like this book, Prabha Kotiswaran’s legal ethnography of sex work in contemporary India is rooted in close observation of the daily lives of female sex workers.¹⁰⁹ By immersing herself in the two Indian sex markets of Sonagachi and Tirupati, Kotiswaran examines these markets’ political economy and the place of law within them. She distinguishes between formal law and its implementation, and underscores “the layers of normative orders, including formal legal rules, social norms, and market structures that affect the bargaining potentials of various stakeholders in sex markets and the outcomes of their negotiations.”¹¹⁰ Yet in contrast to my approach, an explicit theoretical objective drives Kotiswaran’s project: to provide a postcolonial materialist feminist theory that advances the view of sex work as a legitimate form of work (in contrast to an abolitionist perspective, which characterizes all prostitution as sexual slavery).¹¹¹ I do not disagree with Kotiswaran’s perspective. In fact, readers will find ample empirical evidence in support of the “work position” in this book, with sex workers who poignantly articulate how the exchange of sex for money empowers them in their daily lives, and who can speak arrestingly about their rights and contributions to society. Yet I do not place this issue at the heart of my project, which helps explain a core difference in emphasis in our two projects. The attention I pay to the experiences of street-level police officers and health officials – aimed at bringing to light how they interact with sex workers, each other, and with the state priorities and hierarchies that weigh on them – remains largely in the background of Kotiswaran’s study.¹¹²

Rohit De’s book examines how sex workers used the Indian Constitution to challenge a newly enacted antitrafficking law in the 1950s, the early years of the new republic.¹¹³ His sources include the full proceedings of the Supreme Court cases he studied, such as lawyers’ arguments and transcripts of witness statements. Such documents allow him to hear how some sex workers experience the state, thus bringing forth voices that, as noted earlier, are particularly elusive to historians. And while he guards against any suggestion that “this was the authentic voice of prostitutes,” his research also shows how “the Constitution did allow for a voice that represented the prostitute to become visible in a public domain.”¹¹⁴ In contrast to my work, De’s research on the place of law in the lives of sex workers is, like Sommer’s research on Imperial China, firmly on the top of the dispute pyramid: He tells the story of an exceptional subset of individuals who have chosen to engage with the formal legal system, eventually making their way to the Supreme Court of India.¹¹⁵ Yet sociolegal scholars must meet the law where it is. I would have found “no there, there” had I looked for the law in the everyday lives of female sex workers in contemporary China in the spaces where De found it in 1950s India. Instead, I found it in more commonplace interactions between sex workers and the state. The result is a close-to-the-ground account of the daily lives of female sex workers, as well as the police officers and health officials who regulate them that shows the centrality of questions of law and rights in places far removed from the formal legal system and its official records.

Methods, Sources, and Sites

I collected the data for this project through ethnographic observation, interviews, and surveys. I carried out the fieldwork over the course of nineteen months in 2008 and 2009, as well as shorter trips in 2005, 2011, and 2014. Hu Jintao was therefore China’s leader during most of my data collection, and my concluding chapter reflects upon changes under Xi Jinping. While I was based primarily in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, I also spent time in Dongguan, Shanghai, Harbin, Shenyang, Changsha, and two smaller cities in Hebei and Hubei provinces, which I refer to with the pseudonyms of Fushan and Zhengti, respectively.¹¹⁶ In addition, I carried out research in Hong Kong to interview people with expertise in prostitution in mainland China.

My ethnographic research led me on to the streets and into the parks, small brothels, and entertainment venues where sex workers solicit clients. It also brought me into the offices of law enforcement, health, and other government institutions, and occasionally inside a police car, riding along with officers on patrol. In Shenzhen, I carried out ethnographic observation in two red-light districts: Wanqin and Xizhou.¹¹⁷ I lived in a hotel in Wanqin that catered to sex workers and clients. A local madam took me under her wing, and I spent my days in the living room of her apartment-brothel, observing sex workers and clients negotiate transactions before retreating into a bedroom. In the early evening, the madam and I would stroll around the neighborhood together. She would introduce me to others in the community and ward off clients inquiring about whether I was a Russian sex worker under her care.¹¹⁸ In Xizhou, I spent my time outside in the main square, in the local government offices, and inside entertainment venues, talking to sex workers, madams, pimps, and local state officials. In Beijing, I carried out ethnographic observation in the lounge of a sex worker community organization located in the heart of a red-light district. As I became a familiar presence in that space, I connected with sex workers and observed them interact as they would come and go throughout the day – to pick up condoms, ask the staff for medical advice, or take a break. In Zhengti, I ballroom-danced with the police, and also swam and went river tubing with them. I observed police officers play mahjong together and sing karaoke with hostesses in an entertainment venue. At several of my research sites, I distributed condoms and safe-sex brochures alongside local health officials or members of sex work community groups. I absorbed the contrasting vantage points of various societal and state actors by positioning myself alongside different groups in different places. Overall, this ethnographic method provided me with front-row seats to observe regulatory dynamics around prostitution both within and across society and the state.¹¹⁹ It also helped me develop rapport for in-depth interviewing. I carried out almost two hundred interviews with sex workers, clients, madams, pimps, police officers, health officials, other central and local government officials, as well as staff at both domestic and international organizations working in the areas of health, prostitution, women’s rights, policing, and legal services. I also conducted a survey of 568 sex workers in one red-light district in Beijing, and a survey of 89 police officers in southern China. I discuss these research processes in greater depth in the appendices.

Organization of the Book

Part I of the book situates prostitution and its regulation in contemporary China within three dimensions: Chinese history, key characteristics of post-Mao China, and the broader array of possible regulatory approaches to prostitution. Chapter 2 underscores the historical continuities that exist between the status-based patterns of prostitution policy implementation I observe and earlier approaches to regulating sex work in China. It also highlights how prostitution in post-Mao China reflects broader socioeconomic and political developments in the country. Chapter 3 describes the laws, policies, and institutions that govern prostitution in China, and situates them in relation to the spectrum of regulatory possibilities that societies have vis-à-vis the issue.

Part II is about the daily lives of female sex workers. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on the experiences and perspectives of women in the low tier (on the streets and in small brothels), middle tier (hostesses), and upper tier (mistresses), respectively. These chapters bring forth how their lives and attitudes vary depending on the tier of sex work, and cover issues such as work conditions, health risks, perspectives on prostitution, and views of the state. Chapter 7 then examines what they have in common: similar life experiences, comparable thought processes about their engagement in prostitution, and, when they encounter sex worker grassroots organizations, a shared sense of empowerment that comes with the consciousness of belonging to a global community of sex worker civil society.

Part III turns to the individuals behind China’s prostitution policies: the state actors who implement them and the international ones who shape them. Chapter 8 examines how the police enforce anti-prostitution laws: who they punish and how. Here, it is low-tier sex workers who bear the brunt of the state. Chapter 9 maintains its focus on law enforcement, with specific attention to the extractive and protective ways that police officers interact with sex workers when they are not arresting them. These behaviors mainly affect women in the middle tier of the sex industry, and underscore the delicate balancing act that frontline police must engage in to avoid disrupting the economic benefits that a thriving sex industry brings to the local government. Chapter 10 turns to health policies, and highlights the roles and responsibilities of the global health community in shaping China’s approach to prostitution as a public health issue. Chapter 11 then examines how local health officials implement these policies, including their struggles to negotiate pushback from both the sex industry and the police. It uncovers practices that stymie public health goals by overlooking women in the low tier – those most in need of health interventions – and that also harm sex workers. Chapter 12 concludes this study of law in the everyday lives of sex workers, police officers, and public health officials in China with a reflection on changes in China under Xi Jinping and policy implications.