Soon after Deng Xiaoping started the economic reforms, prostitution which was previously almost invisible began its exponential growth in China. And today prostitution is not just a by-product of economic boom but the fully fledged and flourishing industry having serious impact on national economics.
In his essay “Red Light District” Pan Suiming – the prominent Chinese sexologist – compares the infrastructure of prostitution in modern China with a standard business.
Although the sex industry is still illegal, it already has a formed system and operative mechanism. Production and distribution of pornography is itsadvertisement department. The Escort Services are its exhibition and sales department. The medical treatment of sexually transmitted diseases is itsafter-sale department. Clients who directly buy sex with money are its coreproduction department. There are many affiliated industries, such as the accommodation, food and entertainment industry. If the added output value of those affiliated industries that derive income from prostitution and escort services is included, the economic scale of the Chinese sex industryexpands many times.
In the late 1990s one economist tried to evaluate the share of prostitution and its affiliated industries in Chinese economics.
If we estimate that 20 million prostitutes earn 25,000 RMB annually, that comes to 500 billion RMB or is 6 percent of the PRC GDP. Moreover, half of the prostitutes income goes to consumption. Prostitutes need quite a lot of equipment: beepers, cell phones, cabs, apartments or rooms in homes, expensive clothes and fine cosmetics, pharmaceuticals… so the sex industry may well move the economy along with an annual level of consumption of 1 trillion RMB. When we consider that the Chinese GDP in 1998 and 1999 was 7.8 trillion RMB and 8.3 trillion RMB, the contribution of the “sex industry” to the GDP comes in at about 12.1 – 12.8 percent.
According to the estimations of economist Yang Fen the massive break ups on prostitution venues in the second half of 1999 (brought by “Regulations of the Management of Places of Entertainment”)
caused the Chinese GDP to drop by 1%!
The figure of 20 million sex workers seems exaggerated and possibly includes not only full-time prostitutes but also the women who get economic benefits from sexual transactions on irregular basis.
Another paper makes an attempt to quantify the ratio of prostitutes in a bottom-to-top approach.
With over one hundred brothels in Jiading Town (district in Shanghai), there is approximately one brothel per thousand inhabitants. If each brothel is populated with five girls on average, one of every two hundred citizens in Jiading Town work as a prostitute. That is one percent of the entire female population, including young and old, but many times higher in the relevant age span (around 5%). In reality, there are more than five girls per brothel, since some work part-time and on demand.
But this is just one of seven tiers. The total prostitution in Jiading Town, when accounting for bar girls, streetwalkers, dingdong ladies, and er nai, exceeds the ratio of one percent by far. Assuming that Jiading Town is representative for all of China and
two percent of the females work as prostitutes the entire country may have ten million or more prostitutes at any given time in a conservative estimate.
How many of these girls work as prostitutes by choice? It’s difficult to answer this question but the series of surveys (1991, 1995 and 1997) performed by Pan Suiming give a hint about the magnitude of this problem.
The results were as follows:
• In 1991, 23.0% of all the undergraduates in Beijing thought of finding an underground prostitute. The figure was 34.8% in 1995 and 46.8% of the undergraduates in 1997 in the whole country.
• In 1991, 11.3% of the undergraduates in Beijing admitted giving consideration to the idea of selling sex. The figure in 1995 remained at 11.3%. In 1997, the rate increased to 15.4%.
To finish these statistics on a funny note I’d like to mention an interesting article that appeared in Beijing Evening News about two years ago in the midst of financial crisis. It found the
direct link between the high house pricing and the number of sex workers in China’s capital. The author speculated that if police would crack down on prostitution and force all of 200,000 “xiaojie” out of the city, the influx of additional flats would dramatically change the equilibrium of supply-demand in the real estate sector.
As you can see prostitutes are useful as ballast that can be taken aboard or dropped down to keep the country’s economics afloat.
http://www.lovelovechina.com/sex ... n-in-china-part-ii/
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Last edited by atomic3d at 30-10-2012 09:21 ]
