It may seem paradoxical, considering how repressive the Chinese government is–even more so under the current President Xi Jinping–that prostitution and sex trafficking are not only tacitly approved by the government, but also are the only non-state controlled industries that are booming in China.

Prostitution and sex trafficking of Chinese women are supported by the Chinese government for the following reasons:

While prostitution is technically illegal in China, and the women who work as prostitutes face the potential risk of fines and imprisonment, China actually has always had the largest number of prostitutes in the world and is a net exporter of prostitutes to just about every country in the world. Go to any major city in any country in the world, whether it be in the developed western countries such as Japan, America, and Australia, or the developing countries such as the Philippines, Brazil, or Mexico, or even middle eastern countries such as Dubai, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia (yes there are Chinese women working as prostitutes in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan!), you are bound to find Chinese women dressed in skimpy skirts willing to offer their bodies for sex on the street, or hiding behind curtains in seedy massage parlors, or, in some cases, disguised as selling bicycles or as food delivery.

It is estimated that, conservatively, there are anywhere from 4 million to 10 million women in China who are engaged in sex solicitation at any given time, and over 3 million are being shipped overseas each year to foreign countries to engage in prostitution. In addition to top destinations mentioned above, Chinese prostitutes are even finding their ways through “the Belt and Road initiative” into countries that Americans cannot even find on a map, such as the many Central Asian countries as well as many countries in Africa. A Chinese businessman was said to have sold his own sister to a pimp in Ghana. Another Chinese businessman (who also happens to be a Communist Party Cadre) from a State Owned Enterprise (SOE) sex trafficked over 1,000 Chinese women into Nigeria and forced them to engage in prostitution. During the wars in Afghanistan, many Chinese restaurants popped up around American military bases and in addition to serving Chinese food, those restaurants also delivered Chinese female buffet to the starving American soldiers. 

Chinese state sponsored universities famously pimped out their own female students to attract foreign male students, mostly from Africa, but also from Europe and America. See article on Shandong University Female Companions.

Chinese emperors throughout Chinese history have doled out female subjects to foreign dignitaries to showcase the generosity and the beauty of China. In a country where every Chinese is treated as commodities and livestock, there is very little surprise that they would treat their own women as commodities as well, to be sold and doled out as gifts, to be used as sex objects or worse. 

In fact, the penalty and risk for sex trafficking is actually very low, as long as you do not toe the party lines. If you swear undying royalty to the Communist Party, and do not challenge the supremacy of the Communist dictatorship, you can get away with anything in China.

In China, if you openly ask the question, “Is Xi Jinping a dictator?”, you can be fined and imprisoned for up to 3 years. If you openly insult Xi Jinping, you can be imprisoned for life. But if you enslave a few thousand Chinese women and sell them to Myanmar, unless it becomes international news or cause a public uproar that destabilizes the entire society, you likely will get away with it. It is an open secret that every member of the Chinese Communist Politburo has a few thousand Chinese females as concubines. Even lower level cadres can amass a few hundred Chinese females for his own personal pleasure. See article on Vice Principal of Sichuan School of Music.

As an anecdote, one corrupt Chinese official had kept over 100 Chinese women as his concubines, and one very bizarre thing he did was that he plucked out the pubic hair from his mistresses, and made a brush pen out of their pubic hair.

Many brothels ran by Chinese businessmen were especially set up to cater to the very top officials in the Communist Party. Lai Changxing’s Red Chamber, Shanghai’s Secret Red Mansion (上海小红楼), and Chongqing’s Bright Spot (重庆亮点茶楼 a.k.a. the Chinese prostitutes Concentration Camp), Beijing’s Heaven On Earth Night (天上人间) Club, et cetera. 

While sex trafficking do not face much danger, the women who are being trafficked, the Chinese prostitutes themselves, frequently face danger, from both customers and pimps. Most brothels in China operate under the protection of local police and government officials. Many of the Chinese women are coerced to work in those brothels. The New York Times, on the other hand, reports that the vast majority joined the trade voluntarily. 

Reports of prostitutes being violently beaten, tortured, murdered and robbed by their customers are not uncommon. Most of the time, the Chinese news media do not report on those cases unless they start to cause public unrest. In the 1990s, for instance, two brothers would hire prostitutes, have sex with them, rob them and then, kill them. And after they kill them, the two brothers gouged out the kidneys of those women, cooked the severed innards with Chinese vegetables and ate them. The case so horrified the Chinese public that the police had no way to keep it a secret any longer. There is also a famous case where a man had killed more than 40 prostitutes, dismembered their bodies and dumped their severed body parts down sewage drains, causing the sewage to be clogged.

Chinese police themselves are the most frequent abusers of prostitutes, but that does not mean they will NOT arrest, imprison and punish those women for being sinful and for breaking down the morality of the public.

If a prostitute is caught soliciting sexual favors, she will be imprisoned for up to 1 year in prison and all her asset–ALL HER ASSET–will be confiscated. Recently, a very famous Chinese e-celebrity was discovered to be engaged in prostitution. The police raided her apartment, and confiscated over 1 million dollars in asset! She tried to appeal, but the Chinese court indicated that because her money was obtained illegally, through prostitution that is, the police was in the right to confiscate all her money! According to Chinese law, any person who breaks the law will be subject to TOTAL confiscation of all their earnings through illegal means. In another instance, a Chinese software engineer who used VPN to access a remote job in Turkey had all his bank accounts seized by the Chinese government. Some courageous Chinese have openly complained that the Chinese police are worse than the mafia in most civilized countries. 

And when the government faces financial strains, as it does currently, the Chinese police love to raid brothels as a way to obtain more funding. The police department funding is sent to the local government official and the local government official will then redistribute the fund back to the police station. Each police station is rewarded for culling in money for the local government, and the easiest means to do so, especially during economic downturns, is to exploit one of the lowest and most vulnerable people in the China: young, beautiful and forlorn Chinese women who sell their bodies for a living.

Once a prostitute is sent to prison, her life will be worse. The Chinese police consider prostitutes as immoral women who have lost their ways, and therefore do not consider it reprehensible to humiliate them, mistreat them, and abuse them. Often Chinese police will force imprisoned prostitutes to have sex with them to curry favors or to avoid punishment. Interrogations by the police in China often involve torture, such as electrocuting sexual organs, burning their flesh with lit cigarettes, forced posture, forced swallowing of urine and feces, blackmailing of family members, etc. During the trial of Bo Xilai, for instance, the Chongqing Chief police testified that a Chinese woman was forced to witness the rape and torture of her own mother in order to extract a confession from her.

Among some of most common things that the Chinese police love to do:

1. Public shaming. If a prostitute is caught, her parents will be called, and she has to make a confession holding her ID card and detail orally to the public that she is a lewd woman. She has to confess how many guys she has had sex with, how much money she made, and then she has to show remorse by telling everyone that she will from now on not be immoral again. In some cases public shaming is also performed wherein the prostitutes will be paraded around the town while being handcuffed.

2. Sexual humiliation. When police raid brothels, they often refuse to let the prostitutes wear their clothes and would lead them out naked. Video tapes exist on the internet showing naked prostitutes being forced to stand in front of hordes of male Chinese men.

4. Beatings. There is no human rights in China. The Chinese are very proud of that. All human beings in China are treated like animals and all animals are treated like insects. Police will subject prostitutes who refuse to cooperate to brutal beatings.

5. Torture. Jenny Zeng, a fugitive who escaped to America, recounts in her memoir Witnessing History that she had seen a woman in prison being stripped naked, her wrists and ankles tied together and forced to crawl in front of a dozen laughing police officers, both male and female. While she was crawling, they used their electric batons to hit all over her body, causing her to convulse and twist in painful agony.

5. Sex trafficking to foreign countries. Around the year 2022, cases involving Northern Myanmar came into public purview. Chinese police were involved in sex trafficking of thousands of Chinese women to Northern Myanmar (缅北) where those women were enslaved, forced to work in online scams and gambling, and after they became useless, their organs were harvested.