Walking in the streets I couldn’t help but be aware of the numerous “nail places”, “massage centres” and “hairdressers” that were open 24 hours and seemed to have little to do with anything but sex. The women would sit in a window, on display – much like the red light district in Amsterdam (I haven’t been there, just seen it on the tourism photos), except prostitution is illegal here.
In a number of the bars that Willoh and I went to with locals, new locals or expats we were told that a lot of the people here were either a) prostitutes or b) being paid to be there. (The being paid to be there and have a good time idea is nothing new but it was so rampant, so widespread that it beggared belief). In watching the men in these places, who were on the make, it made for a difficult time – who are they talking to? what do they want? how can they be sure what they are engaging in is real?
We were out on western New Years Eve, which isn’t celebrated in Beijing, lots of expats were out at the bar in Sanlitun which is the bar area surrounding one of the major embassy compounds in Beijing. Here the men seemed desperate for an interaction that was real, in fact some of them were hitting on the western women only as they could be sure that this was possibly going to end up in an engagement which didn’t need to involve a haggling for a price.
At another place called Chocolate which is a Russian run and frequented nightclub I was told that if I went onto the dancefloor I would be approached by Russian girls who would dance with me for a while and would then say a price to me (this price was far more than the price that the Mongolian girls were offering). There is a fetish for Russian girls in Beijing and has been for a long time, it could have something to do with Russia’s place in the communist firmament as the top of the pile – or maybe it is just how exotic they are to the locals, tall, blue eyed and blonde as opposed to short, brown eyed and black hair.
All of this is nothing new and I speculated about how this probably does happen, it is just that I don’t see it – it is not part of my daily life in Australia. But it seems more open somehow in Beijing, somehow more visible, indeed there was a “massage shop” that was working out of the bottom of our apartment block, which was maybe 100 metres away from a primary school – so children grow up with this stuff being visible.
I am not sure how this aligns with the PRC governments crusade against pornography on the internet, this makes me think that the internet censorship is more about control than it is about a meaningful moral stance. If prostitution is happening openly on the street then blocking images on computers isn’t going to change all that much. Also – wouldn’t combatting the exploitation of women in China be more important than shutting down the primarily western-run pornography sites? (There are rewards for finding and reporting pornography sites to the PRC government).
