sex in the cities

In a recent post I wrote about conditions for sex workers in some developing nations; namely Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. I wrote that in 1975 hundreds of South Vietnamese sex workers bribed their way onto evacuation flights just before the Communists took over. It seems that they were wise to do so because Communists arrest and intern prostitutes.

In China Communists took control in 1949. That year they arrested large numbers of prostitutes. The quotation below is from The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter.

"Many of the women were sent to a re-education camp. Here, as elsewhere in the country, they were made to follow a strict penal schedule, spending much of their time in study sessions denouncing the mistreatment they had suffered under the old regime. But few conformed to the image of a contrite prostitute projected by propaganda. A fair number were restive and quarrelsome, while a few insulted or physically assaulted the cadres in charge of their re-education. They denounced the manual labour they were forced to perform as a new form of exploitation, apparently unhappy to spend their days locked away, sewing olive-green shirts for the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army. Cao Manzhi, one of the cadres in charge of the whole operation, later admitted that even those inmates who came from low-class brothels did not like being interned and missed their life as prostitutes. But most settled down once they realised that resistance was futile. The majority were sent back to inland areas. Brothels that had managed to survive were finally raided on 25 November 1951. Even at that stage some of the women attacked the cadres in charge of the arrests.

Prostitution was soon proclaimed to be an evil of the past. But in Beijing alone 350 women, some of them only recently released from re-education camps, were soon plying their trade again. Only a handful did so because they could not make a living otherwise. Some pretended to be students or housewives, accompanied by small children and mothers-in-law for cover. A few even wore party uniforms and carried badges. They stood in the doorway openly soliciting customers: 'Come in for a cup of tea!' In other cities too, prostitution went underground. As hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees fled the countryside after liberation, women continued to sell sex in the cities. In Shanghai hundreds of them were arrested in 1952, the women becoming more adept at hiding their activities with every new sweep. In the following years the authorities would adopt much more draconian measures to stamp out vice."

Communists had a weird attitude to sex. "Efforts to relieve sexual frustration privately could lead to public humiliation. One patriotic Chinese who had returned to 'the Motherland' was made to put a sign up over his dormitory bed criticising himself for masturbating." This is from Mao The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. There was hypocrisy though as the book goes on to say "And all the while, Mao was indulging in every sexual caprice in well-guarded secrecy."

So it looks as though Communists are in the same company as Protestant Evangelicals pastors, Catholic nuns and Radical Feminists. They all have a problem with fornication and masturbation too. They all pretend that they have the interests of prostitutes at heart, yet they do untold harm to them.