This book's primary theoretical targets are methodological problems and political biases in China studies, and it uses scholarly and administrative discourses about female prostitution in order to illustrate the field's shortcomings. As befits its embrace of the text-based “new humanities,” its sources are scholarly debates, police and government reports, and secondary sources rather than ethnographic fieldwork.

Jeffreys argues that China studies suffers from several problems. First, it has methodological deficiencies: China studies is dominated by scholars who wrongly claim to have access to the “truth” about China because of their linguistic skills; as “nation-translators” they produce positivist, realist, empiricist works disconnected from the theoretically-oriented “new humanities.” Moreover, scholars who do attempt to apply postmodern or postcolonial theories to China engage it as an object that can illustrate their theories, never as a subject that can generate theory. In short, Anglophone authors privilege the metropolitan discourse and ignore what Chinese people have to say. Secondly, the field suffers from political biases: China Studies is still mired in a Cold War ideological framework in which scholars accept the word of the CCP only “to turn it back on the CCP … to show how and where the CCP and Chinese Marxism have failed” (p. 41). Their analytical reliance on the state/civil society dichotomy emphasizes the power of the state over and above society, with the implication that only non-state actors can speak truthfully. This “preclude[s] the possibility that there might be anything positive or productive about the operation of power in China” (p. 41). Jeffreys advocates replacing the state/civil society dichotomy with the Foucauldian notion of “governmentality,” which forces one to examine the complex historical background and administrative networks in which government officials are enmeshed, and which creates the limits of the possible for them. Lastly, she argues that international NGOs and metropolitan feminists are fundamentally misguided when they push the Chinese government to recognize the validity of sex work because they have no idea what the actual ramifications of this would be in the Chinese context. Such a policy would, unlike the commonsense efforts of the Chinese police, make life worse, not better, for prostitutes.