"I'm getting older," she said over a simple dinner of vegetables and spicy
chicken in a Beijing suburb, a slim gold ring on each middle finger. "Though
the price has gone down, the number of customers is up. I used to receive two
visitors before, and now I have three to four a day. My income is the same, I
just have to work a little harder."
No longer limited to well-known bars or a growing number of karaoke parlors,
prostitutes are everywhere in China today, branching out onto college campuses,
moving into private residential compounds and approaching customers on mobile
phone networks.
Most are from the countryside: rural women placing all their hopes for the
future in China's increasingly competitive urban centers. Some entering the
trade are older than those in the past, and some are much younger. The changing
demographics reflect the country's rapid economic growth and make a statement
about the insatiable quest for money that permeates Chinese society.
"There was no open prostitution 25 years ago," said Jing Jun, a sociology and
AIDS policy professor at Tsinghua University. "Fifteen years ago, you didn't
find sex workers in remote areas and cities. But now it's prevalent in every
city, every county."
Estimates of the number of prostitutes in China vary widely, from 1 million who
earn their primary income from sex, to eight or 10 times that, including people
who sometimes accept money, gifts or rent in exchange for sex. That the numbers
have been allowed to increase illustrates the tricky relationship officials
have with the ancient profession.
The Communist Party is embarrassed by the thriving trade, which goes against
everything it stands for. Occasionally there are highly publicized crackdowns,
and prostitutes are rounded up. But widespread prostitution does not exist
without tacit police approval; the trade brings in money that helps support
poor rural families and lines the pockets of everyone who helps protect the
business -- often including local authorities.
Prostitution flourished in 14th-century China as wealthy Ming Dynasty officials
visited mistresses, kept concubines, registered brothels and taxed courtesans.
But by the late 1940s, Communists were campaigning against prostitutes -- along
with other "socially unreliable" groups such as bandits, opium-smokers and
adulterers -- by monitoring people's housing, hairstyles and makeup.
Though prostitution was officially outlawed after the Communist Party came to
power in 1949, it was never truly stamped out.
Some experts say a complete evaporation of social values caused the explosion
of the trade, and they cite the young sex workers who are in the business for
easy money and fancy clothes. But the majority of prostitutes have violated old
social mores out of desperation to help their families, Jing said, and an
important change in perception may be underway.
"They are absolutely moral. A lot of these women send half their income back to
support their families. They're more filial than I am," Jing said. "Among
government officials, Chinese social scientists, health professionals, they are
coming around to see that prostitution is not fundamentally connected to a lack
of values but a lack of jobs, choices, opportunities and education."
And as the growing number of sex workers forces the price of sex to plummet,
health workers are also concerned about a rise in medical risks.
"The impact is very simple. Sometimes a sex transaction is only 10 yuan [$1.33]
in Sichuan province, under a bridge or an overpass," Jing said.
Jing said about 40 percent of the female sex workers tested by China's Center
for Disease Control and Prevention two years ago were older than 35. "Among sex
workers infected with HIV-AIDS, 60 percent are older than 35. That means there
are some really desperate women," Jing said. "The lower you go in price and
quality of the sex workplace, the lower the rate of condom use."
There were 174,506 reported syphilis patients in China last year, up 31 percent
from 2005, said Wang Quanpei, a Nanjing-based researcher with China's CDC. But
because many people with sexually transmitted diseases visit unregistered
doctors, and partly because many hospitals specializing in these diseases are
badly managed, the actual number of infected patients is estimated to be as
much as 10 times higher than reported, experts said.
AIDS education in China is inadequate, and awareness of STDs remains poor,
surveys show. Increasingly fierce competition among prostitutes means that
often-ignorant customers have growing leverage over prostitutes who feel
disadvantaged.
In a karaoke bar in northern Beijing, for instance, a 37-year-old prostitute
from Hubei province said her main goal was saving enough money to support and
win custody of her 9-year-old son, who lives with an estranged and abusive
husband.
"If I was still with my ex-husband, he would have chopped me into pieces if he
knew what I did for a living," said the woman, who asked to be identified only
by her last name, Wang. "There are other ways to do business, but I need the
money. Old women like us can't make a lot of money here."
She doesn't visit a gynecologist very often, because she doesn't believe she is
sick. And each week, Wang watches the more cautious sex workers in the bar lose
clients to other prostitutes.
"Another girl named Lily was abandoned by a customer named Big Brother Yao
because she refused to have sex without using a condom," Wang said. "He's a
frequent visitor here, and he's famous for not using a condom. He never called
her again. She lost that business forever."
When Wang's customers insist on not wearing a condom, she usually gives in. She
feels safe because she doesn't have sex with customers "very often," she said.
"Who said that you will be infected as soon as you have sex with your
customer?"
Her clients would probably agree. Most men who seek out prostitutes think
sexually transmitted diseases are no more serious than a cold and are easily
cured, according to preliminary results from a 2006 survey by the Institute for
Research on Sexuality and Gender at People's (Renmin) University.
These days, prostitution is becoming less of an organized business and more of
an exercise in individual entrepreneurship. Mid-level sex workers with a few
years of experience are striking out on their own in residential compounds,
renting apartments and finding their own customers, "because it's safer than a
club or bar that's exposed to a police raid," said sexologist Pan Suiming, who
heads the institute, referring to the occasional official efforts to crack down
on the trade. "Competition is fierce."
Male prostitutes, whose prices have also been affected, say their customers are
no longer just bored or lonely middle-age women but mostly a growing number of
female sex workers who hire them in order to erase the sting of being used
themselves.
The 22-year-old freelance prostitute tells her family she works in a
supermarket. Armed with an elementary school education and a short stint as a
textile factory worker, her only other job before becoming a sex worker was
washing dishes 12 hours a day in a hotel in Shandong.
"There was a karaoke parlor in that hotel, and all the girls there didn't have
to work at all, yet they made big money! I worked all day but only got 400 yuan
[$53] a month," she said. "It's all because of money that I became 'bad' and
joined this business."
Washington Post. News researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.
