Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900-1937 - Hardcover

Remick, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804788367 ISBN 13: 9780804788366

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

DRAFT (to be approved by sponsor): The book examines the history of regulated prostitution in twentieth-century China as a way to show how, in concrete, monetary terms, government officials' choices about gender and sexuality-what is acceptable behavior for women and men in these areas-can make local government bigger, more complex, wealthier, more powerful, or just the opposite.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth J. Remick is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. She is the author of Building Local States: China During the Republican and Post-Mao Eras (2004).

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REGULATING PROSTITUTION IN CHINA

GENDER AND LOCAL STATEBUILDING, 1900–1937

By Elizabeth J. Remick

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8836-6

Contents

Maps, Tables, and Figures, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
Abbreviations, xv, 
Introduction: Prostitution, Gender, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1, 
1 The Origins of China's Prostitution Regulation Regime, 23, 
2 Hangzhou: The Light Regulatory Approach, 51, 
3 Guangzhou: Revenue-Intensive Prostitution Regulation, 97, 
4 Kunming: Coercion-Intensive Prostitution Regulation, 151, 
5 The Jiliangsuo: Prostitute Rescue Institutions, 189, 
Epilogue: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Twenty-first Century, 225, 
Notes, 233, 
Glossary, 247, 
Works Cited, 253, 
Index, 265, 

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of China's Prostitution Regulation Regime

STARTING in the last years of the Qing, cities in China began to regulate brothel prostitution. Although weak central governments did not mandate this, it gradually became standard practice around the country in metropolises, provincial capitals, and some more minor cities as well. Even as it was contested by opposition groups of many different political persuasions throughout that time, and periodically suspended in some localities, it always came back as the apparent "default" approach to dealing with prostitution. Prostitution regulation was not permanently abolished until the founding of the PRC in 1949.

In some ways, the adoption and persistence of the regulatory model is hard to understand. Prostitution regulation had been very popular in nineteenth-century Europe and had spread throughout the European empires during that time—but by the time it was adopted in China it was already in decline in Europe, under attack by anti-prostitution social reformers ("abolitionists"). In this chapter, I examine the origins of this model and why it became standard practice in China after its heyday elsewhere, and discuss how its implementation in the Chinese context had different consequences and meanings from those in its original European context.

In Chinese political history, this regulatory system has been associated (particularly by the Chinese Communist Party) with the corruption of the Republican regime and taken as a sign of the Guomindang's backwardness and "feudal" characteristics. In fact, prostitution regulation was a late Qing phenomenon, and became the norm in late Qing and Republican China because both national and local statebuilders at the time saw it as being an integral part of the kind of rational modern state that they sought to create. That is, regulating prostitution was what modern police forces around the world did at that time, so they wanted to do it too, in order to emerge from what they saw as the backward imperial way of doing things. Far from being the kind of "feudal," old-fashioned institution that its critics claimed it was, regulation was for many modernists the only scientific, orderly way to deal with the newly discovered "problem" of prostitution and the associated threats of venereal disease and public disorder.

However, for a number of reasons—a different legal context, a different system of gender relations, different ideas about the moral responsibilities of the state—prostitution regulation in China took on new shades of meaning and shed new light on the Chinese gender system by fully implicating the state in some of its more socially distasteful aspects. In particular, it took on new institutional features that formalized the state's role in upholding and enforcing rules that treated prostitutes and former prostitutes, and indeed women in general, as property rather than as autonomous subjects. The regulatory model from Europe made certain assumptions about prostitution and sex: that men (but not women) were sexually incontinent; that (female) prostitutes were a source of disease and pollution, although the men who patronized them were not; that the state had no proper role in moralizing about people's sexual lives and should at best try to keep people physically safe while they did immoral things. Not all of these assumptions were shared by the Chinese officials who implemented regulation, and that had implications for how the model was deployed.

In this chapter I put the Chinese experience with prostitution regulation into world historical context and show how, even though regulation was perhaps a bit past its expiration date on the world stage, Chinese statebuilders still thought it the most modern way to deal with prostitution, and thus embraced it. And this is why it became the standard across China—not, in its initial stages, because it produced much revenue for most local governments, or because it was good at stopping venereal disease, or because foreigners made them do it, but because it was modern and therefore desirable. Local officials' reasons for maintaining the model were likely more complex, although achieving modernity was still one of their goals.

THE REGULATION OF PROSTITUTION, CHINESE-STYLE: THE LIGHT REGULATION APPROACH

From the mid-eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese government was not especially interested in intervening in or regulating prostitution. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, there had been a small system of state-controlled entertainers and prostitutes in the so-called Bureau of Instruction. Most of the women in it were the family members of men punished for political crimes, and the women's debasement was part of the men's punishment. The early Qing state was also implicated in the creation of a class of prostitutes by conferring debased (jianmin) legal status on entire groups of people, for example, on political enemies, or on regional ethnic groups like the dan people (in Guangdong) or the jiuxing yumin (in Zhejiang) who lived aboard boats. These groups were assigned the same legal status as slaves and people in "mean" occupations, such as entertainers, butchers, and prostitutes. These groups were, until 1723, subject to different legal sanctions than "commoners" (liangmin), were usually forbidden from marrying commoners, and were often forbidden from owning land or crossing over into respectability by taking up prestigious occupations.

Prostitute ("music") households (yuehu) and their members by definition had jianmin status, and the women in other jianmin groups also sometimes engaged in prostitution, which was not legally prohibited and was perhaps even socially expected of them. As Sommer (2000) argues, as long as the legal status hierarchy existed, it was proper and normal for these women, but not commoner women, to have sexual relations outside of marriage, including engaging in prostitution. After the legal status hierarchy was abolished in 1723, the law was changed to ban all kinds of illicit sex (yin). But the implicit prohibition of prostitution was never actively enforced under most circumstances, only in connection with another more serious crime like murder. The pariah status and negative connotations of jianmin groups and occupations, including prostitution, continued to exist socially even after the legal status hierarchy had been eliminated.

By the nineteenth century, prostitution was an entirely private enterprise that for the most part the authorities did not try to regulate stringently. Brothels were usually banned from important central parts of cities, often being pushed to the margins outside of the city walls. It was illegal for officials to visit brothels, and prostitutes were socially ostracized. And yet at the same time, in many parts of the country (Beijing, Guangdong, and the Jiangnan region, for example) officials and other elites openly visited brothels for huge banquets or for more quotidian entertainment and business meetings. Famous prostitutes were also viewed as leaders in fashion and models of womanly accomplishment in music, art, and poetry. In short, in the nineteenth century, it was socially tolerated for men to patronize prostitutes, and stigmatizing for women to work as prostitutes. And the government largely looked the other way.

All of this changed, however, after the turn of the twentieth century as a new regulatory regime began to appear in some cities and subsequently spread across the country to all provincial capitals and other large cities. The pattern followed by officials in most large Chinese cities was what I call here the light regulatory approach. There was not at any point a central-level law or directive requiring that it be put in place, merely local regulations and practices based on some centrally endorsed examples. The approach consisted of a regime of licensing, light taxation, regulation, and health inspection, as well as the establishment of a "rescue" institution, usually called a jiliangsuo, for women who wished to leave prostitution. The approach became even more widespread after 1911, with some trumpeting it (or some of its component parts) as one of the triumphs of Republicanism, even though in most provincial capitals it was well established before the fall of the Qing as part of the New Policies police reform efforts. The major aspects of the regulatory system, usually laid out in municipal police regulations, were as follows:

First, both brothels and individual prostitutes working in them were required to register with the police. Only women could be registered, and male prostitution was not permitted, although it was certainly practiced, especially in Beijing and Guangzhou, both of which had long histories as centers of male prostitution. The term prostitute (jinü) was not usually defined in the regulations, though it was sometimes used interchangeably with the term maiyin zhe, "seller of illicit sex." However, the regulation was applied only to women who worked in formal brothels and not to streetwalkers, casual sex workers, or sex workers working in other venues. Those forms of prostitution were illegal and were called anchang, or clandestine prostitution. Clandestine prostitutes were subject to detention and fines if they were caught by the police.

Second, prostitution was lightly taxed. In most cities, licensing was the only form of tax revenue derived from prostitution and therefore was not a big moneymaker for municipal governments. There were some exceptions. For example, in Guangzhou, which had a per-transaction (per-"trick") tax in addition to a licensing tax, licensing generated a significant amount of revenue, as much as 30 percent of the municipal income in the early 1920s. Nearly everywhere else, however, the licensing fee was nominal, and the number of brothels and prostitutes not great, so the revenue produced made up a very small proportion of total municipal income. In many cities, most of the revenue was earmarked for funding the institutions constituting the regulatory regime itself, such as the venereal disease clinics; in others it was earmarked more generally for the police, or went into a consolidated municipal budget.

Third, cities attempted to confine brothels to particular locations and to regulate the behaviors of prostitutes, brothel owners and employees, and clients inside them. Police usually permitted licensed brothels to operate only in particular areas of the city, although those districts might not be mentioned by name in the official regulations. As for activities inside the brothels, regulations stipulated minimum age requirements for prostitutes (usually 16 sui—that is, 15 years of age according to Western reckoning); labor contract terms; prohibitions against abusive treatment of prostitutes; approved locations and hours of operation; prohibitions against under-age, student, and government official clients; and so on. Sometimes regulations attempted to circumscribe prostitutes' movements by, for example, stipulating the hours and circumstances under which they were allowed to step outside brothels, and to mark them physically by requiring them to wear (or not to wear) certain clothes, colors, or hairstyles so as to prevent confusion with "virtuous" women.

Fourth, the regime usually included a requirement that all prostitutes submit to regular health inspections, the primary concern being venereal diseases, particularly syphilis and gonorrhea, although other kinds of contagious diseases were also sometimes mentioned. Women who refused to be inspected—"tested" probably not being the correct word, since at the time most were subjected to a visual genital examination rather than a blood draw—at stipulated intervals had their licenses revoked. Women who were found to be ill either were sent to a hospital for treatment or had their licenses revoked until they were found to be free of disease. However, many cities either did not set up the municipal clinics required by their regulations or conducted the health inspections very sporadically.

Finally, most cities established jiliangsuo for taking in women who wished to leave prostitution. The logic here seems to have been that if the state was going to regulate and institutionalize prostitution, for moral reasons it had to make it possible for women who were being mistreated and abused by their brothel owners/managers to escape. Therefore, women who claimed abuse in brothels, or who claimed that they were in brothels against their will, could be permitted to enter the jiliangsuo, voiding their contracts with, and debts to, brothel owners. Many of the jiliangsuo also opened their doors to other kinds of marginalized, abused, deserted, or mentally ill women who had nowhere else to go, but separated those women from the former prostitutes.

Most of the jiliangsuo functioned as "industrial schools" where the women learned discipline and productive skills intended to give them income-generating alternatives to prostitution, such as weaving or needlework. The skills also happened to be proper, virtuous activities for respectable married women. Their products were sold to generate income for the institution. Instruction also usually included reading, writing, and math, as well as lessons on running a household, and sometimes some sort of moral or ethical lectures. However, these were not missionary institutions like the most famous Shanghai prostitute rescue organization, the Door of Hope Mission. Rather, they were city- or police-run social welfare organizations. An inmate generally left after a few weeks or months of confinement and training, reintegrating into family life through a marriage arranged by the jiliangsuo, release into the custody of her natal family, or entry into employment as a domestic servant. Inmates were never simply released into society as free agents, because there was no place for respectable women outside of a family unit. It would not have been responsible of the police to let them go away "unprotected."

Elements of the regulatory system began to appear around the country immediately after the turn of the twentieth century, beginning in Beijing and the provincial capital cities. Beijing had a fairly comprehensive version of such a system in its police regulations by 1906 (the year Guangxu 32), and it may even have predated this in some form by a couple of years (Jing shi xun jing zong ting 1910, 378–397). As one might expect, larger cities known for having many prostitutes were among the first to begin regulating prostitution at around this time, including Guangzhou, Nanjing around 1902, and Tianjin around 1905 (Jin Zhong 1996, 197; Tianjin shi difang zhi bianxiu weiyuanhui 1996a, 268). But other provincial capitals and large cities not known for having large sex industries also followed suit. For example, one of the early regulators was Chengdu, where in 1903 the new chief of police wrote regulations requiring that brothels be labeled as "households under surveillance" and started implementing the regulations by 1906 when a licensed zone for brothels was created. A jiliangsuo was also founded in Chengdu as a joint police/elite venture in 1909 (Stapleton 2000, 128–133). Some other capital cities in the interior, where local culture was less accepting of prostitution, were slower to accept the model, but even some of them immediately jumped on the bandwagon.

It is not always clear from existing records exactly when the regulation of prostitution in its fullest form was put into effect in a given locality, but one partial measure of regulation that is fairly easy to confirm is the collection of a tax on prostitution. Taxation of course implies some state knowledge about the number of brothels and their location and registration, but it does not necessarily mean that health inspection, a jiliangsuo, internal regulation of brothels, and so on also existed. A few cities collected irregular taxes on brothels as early as the final decades of the nineteenth century. But from 1903 to 1914, provincial capital cities one by one began to collect regular revenues from prostitution taxes, a sure sign that prostitution was being regulated in some way (Remick 2003, 45–46).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from REGULATING PROSTITUTION IN CHINA by Elizabeth J. Remick. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804788367
• ISBN 13: 9780804788366
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 290
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar