The single best article EVER on China KTVs, brothels, business-bonding
Too long to post the entire thing, so please do fire up the link and read. Extensively and personally researched. Stuff I bet you didn't know (like Zheng Tiantian, an anthropologist who spent several years working as a KTV hostess as part of her PhD) and gritty observations on the scene, plus quotes from the participants:
EXCERPT:
"Alcohol, food, and sex are fun. But in China, the culture of banquet and brothel has become largely joyless, a business tool chiefly directed at transactional relationships with other men.
It comes with a sniggering puerility, even though the majority of the men involved are well into middle-age. Drinking games, groping, crude jokes, and the bullying hunt for weakness, whether over drink or women, are the norm. Anthropologist John Osburg spent several years mixing with the rich in Chengdu, Sichuan province for his book Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich. “These events are like a junior high school party—but with booze and hookers,” he told me.
In private conversation, many businessmen confirm that the process is often a chore. (I include gangsters, the prime subject of Osburg’s research, in the general category of businessmen here; crime, business, and government are often effectively indistinguishable in China.) Especially outside of the metropolises, few of the establishments involved are particularly seductive. Instead, there’s a sweaty griminess of wipe-down sheets and 1970s floral wallpaper, as these photos from one small-time scandal show. In classier establishments, Western pin-ups hang in gold-tinted frames. And endless going out is physically wearing; my old boss would take the train, rather than the plane, because travelling “soft sleeper” gave him a rare chance to rest after two or three nights of “entertainment” for work.
But the purpose of these visits isn’t a good time. It’s to cement business and personal ties, binding men together through the power of taboo and mutual self-exposure, or at least the pretense of it. It lets them judge that the others involved in a potential deal are men of the same stripe."
Now read it:
http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/postcard/bro-code
JtB | |
