This chapter is about low-tier prostitution. In China, selling sex in the lowest tier of prostitution is both difficult and dangerous. Women who do so solicit either on the streets or in small brothels located in apartments or in businesses that masquerade as hair salons or massage parlors. In all of these spaces, work conditions are grueling and take their toll on sex workers’ health. The threat of violence and even death at the hands of clients, madams, and pimps looms large. The beliefs and attitudes of women who sell sex on the streets and in brothels reflect these challenging experiences. Women in this tier are critical of prostitution and of themselves for engaging in it, and oppose proposals to legalize it. They also view the state with suspicion and do not feel comfortable seeking assistance from the police when doing so would reveal that they engage in prostitution. Within Chinese society, the lives of low-tier sex workers elicit both disgust and pity.

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

This chapter is about middle-tier prostitution. The life of a hostess is exhausting. In addition to selling sex, women in this tier of the sex industry spend hours every evening engaging in their other professional responsibilities, which include drinking, dancing, and singing with clients. They face intense competition from their peers. Their work environment exposes them to health risks not only from HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, but also from the alcohol and tobacco they consume as part of their work. Although these conditions are taxing, they also provide middle-tier sex workers with more agency than their colleagues who work on the streets or in brothels, and lead to these women having more positive perspectives on prostitution than do their lower-tier colleagues. Hostesses tend to be assertive and reject any portrayal of their engagement in the sex industry as a story of victimhood. They also exhibit more trust in government institutions, an attitude that on rare occasions can even lead them to make public demands of the state. This work environment, autonomy and initiative contribute to public perceptions that tend to criticize hostesses as lazy and dishonorable.

This chapter is about the local health officials who implement China’s surveillance and behavioral outreach health policies for estimating the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and reducing its occurrence among sex workers. These policies set out clear guidelines for targeting certain types and numbers of sex workers for HIV/AIDS testing and outreach, with the goal of obtaining accurate knowledge of the overall sex worker population and reaching out to the individuals who present the greatest concerns to public health. These policies are also designed to protect the individual rights of sex workers, a prerequisite for obtaining higher quality data and increasing the likelihood that public health interventions will yield safer sexual behaviors. Yet frontline health workers often deviate from these rules, as obstacles within China’s health bureaucracy complicate proper policy implementation. Local health officials must also contend with two powerful entities that are predisposed to oppose their work: the sex industry and the police. Taken together, these challenges lead health agents to focus their testing and outreach efforts on hostesses instead of low-tier sex workers – even though women in the low tier are most in need of health interventions – and result in other irregularities in policy implementation with grave public health consequences.

This chapter explores Angang and Northeast China during the economic reforms following Mao’s death in 1976. As the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) developmental strategy shifted its focus to export-oriented light industry, regions with a greater presence of heavy industry such as Northeast China fared worse than light industry regions such as East China. Despite a series of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms including privatization, the PRC further integrated larger SOEs such as Angang into the party-state bureaucracy. The final echo of the Maoist era emerged in the form of SOE workers protesting for job security and social welfare benefits by appropriating the socialist discourse of the state. As China moved away from socialist industrialization, the legacies of this period in Northeast China transformed the region into a rust belt filled with ageing, unprofitable SOEs in heavy industry.

This chapter explores the different types of illicit and informal economy in the two migrant communities and examines why and how Sanhe gods get involved in the gray economy. It also discusses state intervention in the communities through surveillance, raids, and compaigns as well as through gentrification projects. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ friendships in the community.

This chapter explores the Japanese colonial origins of Angang between 1915 and 1945. The outbreak of World War I reconfigured the geopolitical balance in East Asia, enabling Japan to develop ironmaking in Anshan. World War I also led to the rise of the Soviet Union, prompting interest in economic planning among many outside Russia, including Japanese researchers in Manchuria. These new developments in the interwar years crystallized in state-directed industrialization in Northeast China under Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945. Through Soviet-inspired economic policies, the Japanese-sponsored puppet regime of Manchukuo developed Shōwa Steelworks in Anshan to support Japan’s war and imperial expansion. Reflecting the quintessentially colonial nature of Manchukuo, Chinese workers faced various forms of violence and discrimination on a day-to-day basis, increasing the forced labor mobilization of Chinese prisoners of war. Through planning and violence, the Japanese occupation regime turned Manchuria into the largest heavy industrial region on Chinese soil.