China: the demi-monde flourishes

I got talking the other day to a young lady who spoke the most admirably fluent English. I normally insist on speaking Chinese to people here in Beijing – if only to show off – but she insisted harder. She assured me that she was entirely self-taught.

Somehow she seemed reluctant to mention what she did for a living. She began with a long spiel about hailing from a small village in Shanxi province, an unprepossessing dustbowl in what might be called the Chinese mid-West. She had already obtained a degree or diploma in sociology, her chief interest, and now, aged 23, was saving up for further study in business or economics, as people from poor families have to sacrifice their interests to their futures. In the meantime she had to make some money, so…

No, not quite what you’re thinking. She works as a waitress in Beijing’s best-known knocking-shop, a set-up that has existed at one location or another for 20 years. (A very pretty girl, she is not herself for sale.) This place presumably has a watertight arrangement with Jingcha Plod, or more likely his bosses. It’s not strictly a brothel, as nothing happens on the premises, but girls are allowed to come there (subject to permission from the plods on the door, who don’t stop any males) to tout for business. There’s a bar, and a dance floor, and goodish music, and it’s perfectly possibly to spend an enjoyable and innocent evening there, if you like a slightly sleazy backdrop. (And I do.)

The Beijing demi-monde, like everything else here, changes its form constantly. Right now the Mongolians are back in town. For a few years now, Beijing has been a lucrative target for the enterprising and broad-minded beauties of Ulan Bator. The Mongolian ethnic type is well suited to the business, with Oriental looks on generous quasi-Russian figures.

But last time I was here there were none in sight; the visa tap had been turned off. Now it is dripping again; the girls can have two-week visas, whereas it used to be three months. (Trying to curtail prostitution is the world’s second oldest profession, and one is reminded of the little Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dyke.) The stories are all the same; no work, large families, fatherless babies, feckless male relatives.

Whether or not one regards the work itself as unpleasant, the attendant circumstances certainly have been. The girls are foreigners working illegally, and thus have no rights. A Mongolian girl I knew a few years back told me that she had known four colleagues who died in Beijing; two drunken accidents, one murdered by a client, one picked up in a police round-up and made to stand in waist-deep cold water for hours, from which she picked up a fatal infection.

“May I ask you a personal question?” my young friend asked as we finished our caramel lattes. “What do you think of the business that goes on in our bar?” I told her what I think and always have; that this is something that has always gone on and always will; that, if the poor are to be always with us, then so will prostitution. I am glad to say that she agreed wholeheartedly.