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有所为有所不为
呵呵，找小姐这种事情我从来不干。何必淫人妻女？下文中人大那教授说出什么卖淫能解决她们自身的失业问题的话来，真是禽兽不如！
Sex Trade Thrives In China
Localities Exploiting A Growing Business By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 4, 2003; Page A01SANYA, China -- Inside a darkened waiting room that smells of cigarette smoke and mold, the karaoke hostesses of the Guoxi Hotel occupy a long couch. Some apply makeup. Others adjust bra straps and waistbands. Liu stares blankly toward a big television screen, upon which a young woman with flowing black hair sings in Cantonese about a faraway lover.
Waiting fills most of the hours for a Miss KTV, as the karaoke hostesses are known. Waiting for men fresh from the palm-fringed beaches of this resort town on Hainan Island. Hainan is perhaps best known in the United States as the place where an American surveillance plane crash-landed in 2001 after a confrontation with a Chinese military aircraft. In China, the island is known as a haven for prostitution.
When a client arrives, requesting a private room, the girls snap to attention. The mama-san picks Liu and two others, who stand nervously in front of the customer for inspection in their tight black pants and halter tops. His choice will determine who will take home nothing tonight, and who will collect tips of $25 or more for flirting and touching while he sings and drinks. He might invite them back to his hotel for sex, handing over as much as $125. It is more money than Liu made in two months as a salesclerk in her hometown 1,000 miles away.
Liu, whom The Post is identifying by only her family name, and the others at the Guoxi Hotel are part of what may be China's most dynamic capitalist enterprise -- a flourishing trade in sex. Though technically illegal, it has become increasingly open and ubiquitous in cities and towns across the world's most populous country. Some local governments have tapped into the flow of money by taxing the trade. As many as 10 million people take part in the industry, according to an estimate in the 2001 U.S. State Department human rights report for China.
The trade has always existed here on a smaller scale, but its rapid growth is a product of China's ongoing economic transformation from a communist country in which jobs and social benefits were modest though assured into one where nearly anything is possible but nothing is guaranteed. Money-losing state companies are closing, leaving tens of millions out of work. The women -- and, increasingly, men -- who work in the sex trade are among tens of millions who have forsaken homes in China's poorer, interior regions for better prospects in coastal areas booming with foreign investment and new wealth.
In a way, Liu and her cohort are models of the kind of rugged individualism that China's leaders have sought to inculcate as they have tied the country's future to the free market. "These prostitutes have solved the unemployment problem for themselves," said Pan Suiming, a sexology professor at People's University in Beijing.
But not without grave cost to themselves and Chinese society in general. The sex trade is an increasingly significant channel for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, according to health officials. Since 1995, cases of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia have increased more than 30 percent annually, according to government data. Experts say those numbers are surely low given that most patients seek treatment in private clinics that do not report data to central authorities. More than 120 million Chinese are already infected with hepatitis B, and at least 1 million have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the government.
In some countries -- notably Thailand and the Netherlands -- governments have acknowledged the scope of their local sex trade and targeted prostitutes with programs to encourage condom use to prevent the spread of infections. Not in China. Local governments are enmeshed in prostitution through their ownership of hotels that draw customers and profit from the trade, but for the Communist Party, whose legitimacy rests in part on having supposedly eradicated such social vices, the thriving industry is deeply embarrassing. That has stymied efforts to regulate it and limit its harm.
"They don't want to talk about prostitution," said Xu Keyi, who oversees the Di Tan Hospital Research center for Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Beijing. "They figure the communist system is the best system in the world, so we wouldn't have prostitution. It's an ugly thing and we don't like ugly things."
At the local level, the sex trade engenders corruption. Prostitutes in massage and beauty parlors as well as karaoke lounges must hand over tips to everyone from the mama-sans who arrange the encounters to taxi drivers and tour agents who bring in clients. They must share their take with the bosses who employ protection syndicates that dispense a mixture of cash and violence to encourage would-be earnest local officials to look away, the sources said. Much of the money lands in the hands of local police and other officials, according to those in the trade.
Four years ago in Shenyang -- an industrial city in China's northeast -- the mayor, Mu Suixin, urged the opening of bars and massage parlors as an antidote to unemployment.
He gave prostitutes licenses and applied 30 percent taxes to their earnings. The resulting windfall encouraged other cities to follow suit.
That has helped make China's sex trade one of the world's more brazen. At the Zhaolong Hotel in Beijing -- a five-star, government-owned establishment that is often full of Chinese military officers -- an older woman solicits male guests in the lobby during evening hours, in a normal voice and in full view of hotel staff. At other hotels around the country, male guests are routinely awoken by hotel receptionists, who ask, "Are you lonely?" A company that calls itself Yuan Union organizes sex parties geared to foreign diplomats and businessmen in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other major cities, according to an e-mail solicitation.
China's government tolerates prostitution for its economic value. For one thing, many in the trade are helping to support families back home in struggling rural areas.
At Club Butterfly, a karaoke lounge in Shenzhen, a bustling city of new skyscrapers just over the border from Hong Kong, Pan, 24, said she gave up hopes of a university education and left her home in the western city of Chongqing to work as a prostitute so that her younger brother could continue to attend school. She is now sending as much as $300 a month home. She tells her parents she is a waitress.
"In China, daughters are not very important," she said. "It's the son that matters. Unless I leave and find work, there's no way that my little brother can continue his education."
Three years ago, Liu was making $50 a month in a state-owned department store in Dangyang, a city in the central Chinese province of Hubei.
Like many state-owned companies, the store was losing money. When a private businessman took control, he laid off workers, including Liu, to cut costs. Liu's parents, who once enjoyed stable incomes from state-owned businesses, were now heavily in debt.
Liu, then 23, followed a friend who had already moved away and landed a sales job in Shenzhen, booming with money from the thousands of Hong Kong people who moved there to save on living costs. Liu found her sales job for about $100 a month, twice her salary at home. She and her friend shared a small bed in a tiny room, she said, one of six separated by plywood boards on a single floor of a house. Her rent was $50 a month. Food and transportation ate up another $40 a month. She was barely getting by. Some months she was borrowing from her friend.
Early last year, she decided it was time to move on. Her cousin was already in Hainan, working as a hostess. Liu called her.
Hainan markets itself as a family tourist destination and convention locale. But once the sun sets, young women begin arriving at the beach resorts.
Liu said she knew full well what the job description of a hostess usually means. Here, she could at least be sure she would not run into anyone she knew from home and suffer the disgrace of being discovered by her parents. "If they knew, they would throw me out of the family," she said.
At first, Liu worked in the same karaoke place as her cousin. But it was a lower-end establishment and the tips tended to be small. Two months ago, she switched to the Guoxi, a higher-class place frequented by visitors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Every few weeks, she said, one of the men invites her to his room.
Liu is earning about $400 a month, she said. It is enough to send home about $50 and still set aside much of the rest. Enough for the slinky dresses she needs to buy at the market, and enough for the makeup that occupies a low table in the bedroom she shares with her cousin. They split the $90 monthly rent with a third roommate, a former police officer from Hubei. A color television occupies a table in their sitting room.
Liu has designs on putting away enough money to go back to Hubei and open up a flower shop. Maybe next year.
"This isn't my real life," she said. On her television, another woman is singing in Cantonese about love gone wrong. Save for the sunlight splashing through the sitting-room window, she could be in the club. Waiting. So much waiting. "I just want to make that money and go home." |
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发表于 2003-1-6 12:51:08
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发表于 2003-1-6 16:41:48
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