This chapter is about second wives and mistresses, who form the highest tier of sex work in China. These women live in a world of simultaneous precariousness and power. Their precariousness comes from their total dependence on one man. Unlike women in the lower tiers of the sex industry who solicit on the streets, in brothels, or in entertainment venues, for second wives, finding another client can be a complicated, drawn-out process. Their vulnerability also comes from the state of limbo inherent in a mistress arrangement. They know the relationship is temporary, and while they often yearn for marriage, as kept women they cannot take steps toward that goal. Their power, meanwhile, comes from the emotional dependence their clients sometimes have on them: smitten men will go to great lengths to keep their second wives happy and shower them with countless gifts to do so. It also comes from the knowledge that second wives sometimes gain of their client’s business activities, which provides these women with tools that can be used to help orchestrate his professional downfall when a relationship sours. This combination of vulnerability and strength presents a picture of second wives that belies their harsh reception in Chinese public opinion.

What does Chinese law have to say about people who are involved in sex work and the places where it occurs? Prostitution control is a universal problem for which states have adopted a variety of policies to address the public order, public health, and commercial challenges that it presents. This chapter describes that range of regulatory possibilities. It then explains the official choices that China has made, through discussions of the policing, health, and taxation rules and institutions that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted to regulate prostitution.

This chapter is about the influence of transnational actors on China’s sex worker health policies. While the policing of prostitution in China is a story of domestic law and politics, the public health approach to regulating sex work in China starts in the international global health community. It then makes its way into central government health institutions in Beijing, and trickles down into the lives of local state health workers and the sex workers in their community. These transnational roots matter: they have shaped both the content of sex work health policies and the public health officials who manage their administration. Indeed, the approach that China’s health policies and officials endorse for gauging the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and reducing its occurrence among sex workers, and the language these authorities use, reflect best practices in the global public health community. Yet the obstacles that Chinese health agents encounter result in practices that fall short of these ideals and harm sex workers. That often grim reality is the subject of the next chapter. What I highlight in this chapter is how the global public health community working in China to support the creation of HIV/AIDS policies seems disengaged from what actually happens on the ground.

This chapter is about how police officers engage with sex workers when they are not enforcing anti-prostitution laws against them. By focusing their enforcement efforts on low-tier sex workers, the police help create a space for the middle tier of China’s sex industry – entertainment venues and their hostesses—to thrive. I find that law enforcement officers engage actively and in myriad ways with the sex industry when they are not focused on arresting sex workers. Some of their actions are purely extractive interactions. Yet other police behavior, while still self-serving, also benefits sex workers. Making sense of police actions in this context requires shifting our framework from exclusively viewing police as powerful figures in relation to sex workers to also viewing them as street-level bureaucrats who are accountable to the local government and the vast police bureaucracy of which they are at the forefront. This approach provides a different perspective on police officers, underscoring their weakness within China’s bureaucratic system rather than their strength in relation to the sex workers. Their vulnerability vis-à-vis the state even affects how they engage with sex workers and underscores conditions under which the job security of frontline police officers in fact depends on a cooperative local sex industry.

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.

This chapter is about the perspectives and experiences that female sex workers in China share across tiers of prostitution. The daily lives of low-tier sex workers, hostesses, and second wives in China differ from each other in important ways. Yet despite relatively fixed boundaries between tiers of prostitution, these women do not exist in unrelated, independent silos. After all, their source of income comes from the same activity: exchanging sex for money or other material goods. The chapter first highlights how movement across tiers of sex work is limited, and how low-tier sex workers and hostesses express a preference for the work conditions in their own tier, rather than voice a desire to move up in the pecking order. It then examines narratives that these women have in common across all three tiers. Lastly, it discusses how sex workers who cross paths with grassroots organizations develop a shared consciousness of their membership in a global community of sex work civil society, and appropriate its language and symbols in their own lives.

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.