[NYTr] "Oldest Profession" Flourishes in China

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Rick Kissell

The Washington Post - Aug 5, 2007
(no URL supplied)

Oldest Profession Flourishes in China

Economic Boom, Erosion of Values Cited in 
Increased Competition Among Sex Workers

By Maureen Fan

BEIJING -- The 22-year-old was a freelance prostitute. Henna-haired, 
eyebrows painted and dressed no differently than a college student, she 
moved from beauty salon to beauty salon, taking calls on her mobile 
phone from salon managers when they couldn't find enough girls for all 
their customers.

She said she wasn't as well paid as call girls in some of Beijing's 
toniest hotels. Nor was she as poor as the women on construction sites, 
who sometimes service scores of migrant workers a night for barely more 
than $1 per customer. Two years ago, when she worked in her native 
Shandong province, she charged $27 for a session.

By the time she came to Beijing last June, the market price for women 
like her was $20. With a couple of customers a day, she could make 
$1,350 a month, save most of her earnings and still send money home,
she said. But now, because of increased competition from younger
workers newly arrived from the countryside, her price has dropped to
$13.

"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."

[News researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.]