How China’s market economy has fuelled a prostitution boom
Lijia Zhang says the country’s economic reforms have ushered in opportunities but also setbacks, including a resurgence of gender discrimination that is pushing more vulnerable women into sex work
In our old family album, there was only one photograph of my maternal grandma in her youth, in which she looked like a film star with her silk cheongsam and permed hair. Then, at her deathbed in 1998, I learnt that my beloved grandma had been a prostitute!
As this shocking revelation sparked an intense curiosity about prostitution, I started to see prostitutes everywhere. In the glow of pink neon lights, made-up women, their dresses as thin as cicadas’ wings, operate from massage parlours, hair salons or bathhouses, all fronts for brothels.
I decided to write a novel on prostitution in China. For a while, I volunteered with an NGO for female sex workers in Tianjin, a prosperous port city south of Beijing, where I discovered how massive the sex industry had become.
I blame China’s market economy for this phenomenon because, in the process of China’s transition from a planned to a market economy, women have shouldered too much of the burden and cost. This has driven some of the most vulnerable women into the flesh trade as it presents one of the few options they have.
A policeman conducts a check of a public bathhouse as masseurs serve their guests in Qingdao in the wake of a nationwide crackdown on the sex trade in 2014. Photo: AFP
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Having gained power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party shut down the brothels and declared the oldest human trade eradicated. In the reform era, with growing wealth, relaxed social controls and a large mobile population, the sex industry has made a spectacular return – underground, of course, as it is still illegal. And the market economy has also placed women at a disadvantage. The income gapbetween genders has been widening. In 1990, urban women on average earned 78 per cent of what men did; the figure today has dropped to 67.3 per cent. Rural women fare even worse at 65 per cent.
The market economy has brought opportunities to women, particularly educated urban women, but also setbacks. The traditional attitude of viewing women as inferior to men, which had been repressed by Mao, has resurfaced with the economic reforms. Some companies set much higher recruiting standards for women, while others refuse to hire women of childbearing age. Female university graduates are having a harder time finding employment whereas, in the past, the government allocated jobs to graduates regardless of their gender. When the ailing state-owned enterprises laid off workers to become more competitive, women were always the first to go.
Chinese police detain a group of suspects during an anti-prostitution raid at a hotel in Dongguan in 2014. Photo: AP
