Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900-1937

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Remick, Elizabeth J., 1966– author.

Regulating prostitution in China : gender and local statebuilding, 1900–1937 / Elizabeth J. Remick.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8836-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Prostitution—Government policy—China—History—20th century.   2. "Sex role—China—History—20th century.   3. Local government—China—History—20th century.   I. Title.

HQ250.A5R46 2014

363.4'40951—dc23

2013047795

ISBN 978-0-8047-9083-3 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Sabon

REGULATING PROSTITUTION IN CHINA

GENDER AND LOCAL STATEBUILDING, 1900–1937

Elizabeth J. Remick

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

To Yuki, Charlotte, and Alex with love

Contents

Maps, Tables, and Figures

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Prostitution, Gender, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century China

1. The Origins of China’s Prostitution Regulation Regime

2. Hangzhou: The Light Regulatory Approach

3. Guangzhou: Revenue-Intensive Prostitution Regulation

4. Kunming: Coercion-Intensive Prostitution Regulation

5. The Jiliangsuo: Prostitute Rescue Institutions

Epilogue: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Twenty-first Century

Notes

Glossary

Works Cited

Index

Maps, Tables, and Figures

MAPS

MAP 2.1. Hangzhou, 1930s

MAP 3.1. Guangzhou, mid-1930s

MAP 4.1. Kunming, ca. 1920

TABLES

TABLE 2.1. Hangzhou municipal revenues from prostitution tax and their percentage of total municipal revenues, 1927–1934

TABLE 3.1. Number of registered prostitutes in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Guangzhou, selected years 1875–1936

TABLE 3.2. Guangzhou municipal revenues from prostitution tax and their percentage of total municipal tax revenues, selected years 1921–1936

TABLE 3.3. Guangdong provincial revenue from provincial prostitution surtaxes, 1914–1932 and 1936

TABLE 4.1. Revenue from the huajuan prostitution tax in Kunming compared to expenditures of institutions receiving earmarked funds from huajuan, 1923–1926

TABLE 5.1. Entry and exit of women from Hangzhou Jiliangsuo, 1929–1932

FIGURES

FIGURE 3.1. Marching band in the Social Purity Movement’s anti-prostitution protest, Guangzhou, April 1, 1922

FIGURE 5.1. Front door of the Beijing jiliangsuo (police-run prostitute rescue home) ca. 1917–1919

Acknowledgments

The origins of this book are in my earlier work on taxation, public finance, and local statebuilding in Republican and post-Mao China. I was interested in the process through which local governments went from having very circumscribed functions (collecting taxes, dispensing justice, and doing a few other minor jobs) in the late Qing dynasty to having a recognizably modern role that included providing public education, social welfare, policing, public health facilities, and sophisticated infrastructure projects. While I was working on county case studies in Republican-era Guangdong province, I repeatedly encountered a mysterious item in county budgets: the flower banquet tax (huayanjuan). I didn’t know what it was, but it was clearly very important; for example, in 1929, revenue from this one item was equal to 54 percent of total county revenues in Nanxiong county, and for the next seven years was second only to the provisional land tax as a source of county revenue (Nanxiong caishui zhi bianzuan lingdao xiaozu, 1988, 29, 93, 103). After digging further, I discovered that it was a tax on legal, registered prostitution, that it was collected province-wide, and that it was crucial to the municipal budget of the provincial capital, Guangzhou, as well. In fact, throughout the 1920s, prostitution taxes made up between 10 and 30 percent of municipal tax revenues in Guangzhou.

A major theme of my first book was that local governments’ mobilization of new resources made local statebuilding possible—that is to say, the construction of the modern state through its downward extension of reach, growth in size, and expanding range of functions at the level of the province and below (Remick, 2004). And so what I saw very clearly in this case was that, without that prostitution tax, there would have been either extremely circumscribed local statebuilding in the places I was studying, or perhaps none at all. This seemed worth investigating. Was it true everywhere? As I soon discovered, it was not. The counties I was studying in Hebei had no prostitution tax revenues during the 1920s and 1930s. I started to investigate the role of the prostitution tax around China more broadly and found that Guangdong was an extreme outlier. In this process, I also began to learn more about the complex relationships between the local state and brothels in the nexus of regulation, and how those relationships varied and fell into a few broad patterns. This book is the result of these observations.

In the China field, as in many others, the kind of research we are able to do is often affected by when and where we do it. I conducted the archival research for this book in China during 2002 and 2004. In 2002, I was granted broad access to relevant materials in Guangzhou, and, in 2004, somewhat more limited access in Hangzhou. I took a short scouting trip to Kunming in 2002, and was given a quick preview of some materials and a search of the municipal archive’s catalog. The police section of the archives contained huge amounts of material related to the police-run brothel, as well as related materials in the public health section under the police. However, when I returned to Kunming in 2004 for a longer fieldtrip, I was denied all access to the police section of the municipal archives; in addition, I was denied access to the pre-1949 section of the provincial public library owing to the perceived sensitivity of my topic. Fortunately, the provincial archives welcomed me, and so I was able to sketch out the contours of a case study. I hope that one day other scholars, Chinese or foreign, will have better access than I did to what is likely a goldmine of information in the Kunming municipal archives and the Yunnan provincial library.

I have spent a decade and a half working on this project, and along the way have incurred scholarly and personal debts to friends and colleagues that I will never be able to repay. I would particularly like to thank Bridie Andrews, David Art, Thomas Cardoza, Craig Colbeck, Heather Curtis, Madeleine Yue Dong, Sara Friedman, Kelly Greenhill, Sue Ellen Gronewold, Gail Hershatter, Rachel Hsu, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Tina Phillips Johnson, Zwia Lipkin, Felicity Lufkin, Katharine Moon, Sarah Pinto, Helen Remick, Jack Remick, Oxana Shevel, Kellee Tsai, Lily Tsai, Elanah Uretsky, Paola Zamperini, and Wang Zheng for reading, commenting on the work in progress, and steering me toward important resources. Thanks to Elizabeth Perry and the late Christina Gilmartin for providing institutional support at crucial moments. I am grateful to Luo Yanjun, Yin Hongqun, Cha Wenshi, Yuan Jianwei, and Chen Ding for superb research assistance and scholarly comradeship. Special thanks also go to my mentor in Guangzhou, Prof. Huang Xunba, and his staff at the Guangdong Provincial Local Gazetteers Office, and to Prof. Yu Xiaofeng at Zhejiang University. Choi Chi-yeung, Virgil Ho, and the other participants in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology humanities seminar gave me important early feedback. Thanks also to Kristin Stapleton for generously sharing her Chengdu Tongsu Ribao microfilm with me.

I could not have undertaken this project without the assistance of the staff of the many libraries and archives where I found materials. My warmest thanks to the staffs of the Zhejiang Provincial Library, Hangzhou Municipal Archives, Zhejiang Provincial Archives, Yunnan Provincial Archives, Guangzhou Municipal Archives, and Guangdong Provincial Archives. Thanks to Martha Smalley and Joan Duffy of the Yale Divinity School Library Special Collections office, the staff of the Harvard-Yenching Library at Harvard University, and the Andover-Harvard Theological Library. My appreciation also goes to the helpful staff at the Wheaton College archives, and the staffs of the Hong Kong University Library, Zhongshan University Library, Zhejiang University Library, Yunnan University Library, South China Normal University Library, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library, all of which I visited for this project.

My gratitude also goes to Stacy Wagner, Gigi Mark, and Janet Mowery at Stanford University Press for their good taste, discernment, and hard work in bringing this book to fruition.

I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), whose China Studies Award made it possible for me to conduct a large portion of the fieldwork. In addition, the Tufts University Faculty Research Committee provided invaluable funding for the balance of the research. Naturally, the opinions expressed in this work are my own and not those of the ACLS, the SSRC, or Tufts University.

Finally, I want to thank my husband, Yuki Yamamoto, for his support throughout the time I was working on this project. He did not complain even once when I ran off to China to do research for six months only weeks after our wedding. He has been a great partner in raising our babies since they joined our family. With him I share the joys and heartbreaks, big and small, that make up family life, and also the hard labor required by our daily juggling act, wherein we struggle to keep all the knives and flaming batons—work, family, play—high enough in the air that nobody is seriously injured. It is to him and to our children, Charlotte and Alex, that this book is dedicated.

Abbreviations

ABBREVIATIONS FOR ARCHIVAL MATERIALS

Archival sources are cited by file number and page number (e.g., 106/1/676, 115) after the following abbreviations:

GDPA   Guangdong Provincial Archives

GMA   Guangzhou Municipal Archives

KMMA   Kunming Municipal Archives

YNPA   Yunnan Provincial Archives

ZJPA   Zhejiang Provincial Archives

ABBREVIATIONS FOR PERIODICALS

GDGB   Guangdong gongbao. Guangzhou.

GDQB   Guangdong qunbao. Guangzhou.

GMR   Guangzhou minguo ribao. Guangzhou.

GSG   Guangzhou shizheng gongbao. Guangzhou.

HSJ   Hangzhou shizheng jikan. Hangzhou.

HZMR   Hangzhou minguo ribao. Hangzhou.

HZRB   Huazi ribao (The Chinese Mail). Hong Kong.

KSJ   [Kunming] Shizheng jikan. Kunming.

KSY   [Kunming] Shizheng yuekan. Kunming.

NCH   North China Herald. Shanghai.

XDB   Xin Dian bao. Kunming.

YMG   Yunnan minzheng gongbao. Kunming.

ZJRB   Zhijiang ribao (The Chekiang Herald). Hangzhou.

ZJSB   Zhejiang shangbao. Hangzhou.

ZZHGFY   Zhongyang Zhengzhi Huiyi Guangzhou fenhui yuebao. Guangzhou.

ZSZG   Zhejiang sheng zhengfu gongbao. Hangzhou.

Introduction

Prostitution, Gender, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century China

PROSTITUTION was a huge business in China during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of women worked in brothels as courtesans and in public venues as streetwalkers. In many cities, going to brothels for banquets, entertainment, gambling, alcohol, opium, and sex was one of the most popular forms of recreation for men with even only a little money, and brothels were one of the most important places to conduct business, along with teahouses and restaurants. Famous prostitutes were important leaders of fashion and culture in many cities. Large red-light districts supported hundreds of businesses in major cities, and prostitution, opium, and gambling were the lifeblood of organized crime. Not surprisingly, people in China frequently debated the merits of prostitution, in print, in public, and in private. Some thought it was just good clean fun, and others found it shamefully immoral. Some viewed it as wasting male patrons’ valuable family resources, others as an economic lifeline for poor women. Some argued it was a vile exploitation of women, while others claimed it was a benign part of the natural order of things between men and women. Still others saw it as a symbol of national weakness, decadence, or effeminacy. Indeed, many people believed it was simply not a problem at all. These arguments were debated in newspapers, magazines, protests, moral cleanup movements, study groups, churches, and schools.

Debates also played out in municipal council and provincial legislature meetings, and in discussions among provincial and municipal officials. Because prostitution was such an important and visible part of daily life and the economy, it became a major public policy issue. Politicians staked their credibility and their moral fitness to lead on their ability to deal with the problem of prostitution. Dealing with it might mean cleaning up their cities by preventing prostitutes from soliciting on the streets, or safely managing the massive floating cities of brothel boats on rivers and lakes so as to save prostitutes and clients from death by drowning or fire. It could also involve stopping rowdy soldiers from rampaging through brothel districts; banning child prostitution; preventing the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea from prostitutes to clients and then on to innocent wives and children; or protecting the virtue of good women amidst all this sexual excess. It might even mean banning prostitution altogether.

These problems of public order, public health, and the proper ordering of gender relations dogged early twentieth-century cities. In part to solve these problems, officials in the first decade of the century turned to regulating prostitution. In doing so, they transformed prostitution not simply into a problem of public order but into a target of social reform, an object of the nascent public health system, and, in some cities, a crucial source of state revenue without which there could not have been a fully articulated modern local state. In short, local officials’ decisions to regulate prostitution shaped the structures, functions, and capacities of local states in important ways.

This book is a study of regulated prostitution in China and its relationship to local statebuilding during the first half of the twentieth century. Following the lead of European states and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, cities around China began to register, tax, monitor, and sometimes give venereal disease inspections to prostitutes. In spite of constant political attacks and resistance from many quarters, this local approach to dealing with prostitution continued throughout the period 1906–1937 and again between 1945 and 1949, even as it took different forms in different cities. Prostitution at that time was an integral part of the system of gender relations, prostitute being one of only a few fates available to women and girls besides wife/mother/concubine, servant, or factory worker. State intervention in the form of regulating prostitution connected the local state, politics, and gender relations. How local governments chose to shape this institution that was so integral to, and constitutive of, the system of gender relations transformed local states themselves. This tells us that gender needs to be written into the story of statebuilding in China, even though women, usually barred from political life at that time in China, were not visible political actors.

Rather than being a peripheral social issue, prostitution and its regulation were at the heart of the modern statebuilding project undertaken by Chinese local governments starting with the New Policies (1901–1911) during the last years of the Qing dynasty and continuing through the Republic (1912–1949). Chinese officials followed the lead of the most powerful countries in the world in claiming that regulation was the best, most modern, and most scientific way to deal with prostitution. That is, far from being some kind of feudal remnant as opponents later claimed, prostitution regulation was for the modernists one of the keys to an orderly, healthy society and a strong state. It therefore was adopted as part of the modern policing model in provincial capitals and other major cities after the turn of the century. In practice, local officials made different choices about the precise sort of regulatory regime to implement. Their choices had significantly different effects on the structure and function of local government, including varying levels of fiscal and coercive power, the provision of social services, and other crucial markers of local state capacity. The most extreme example of this is that in the 1920s, the Guangzhou municipal government was able to build China’s most modern local government using the city’s massive prostitution tax revenues, which equaled 30 percent of city revenues in some periods. Other cities, lacking this resource, could not afford the roads, schools, and other social services that Guangzhou developed.

In order to show how local governments’ different ways of regulating prostitution affected local statebuilding outcomes, the book first identifies three main subtypes of prostitution regulation in China. These include the most common approach of light taxation and monitoring, which I call the light regulation approach; a revenue-intensive approach characterized by heavy taxation; and a coercion-intensive approach of police-monopolized state-run brothels. Case studies representing each of these three regulatory approaches—Hangzhou (light regulation), Guangzhou (revenue-intensive), and Kunming (coercion-intensive)—illustrate the different consequences and implications of each for statebuilding. All three forms of prostitution regulation led to local statebuilding; but the three different approaches produced different outcomes. The kinds of statebuilding associated with each approach were, respectively, confined to the regulatory system itself; widespread across all the local state apparatus; and concentrated within the broader coercive apparatus of the local state.

WRITING GENDER AND PROSTITUTION INTO THE STORY OF MODERN CHINESE STATEBUILDING

Using a gender lens to examine local statebuilding in China, we can begin to understand how the state and systems of gender relations, here manifest in the practice of prostitution, are intertwined in measurable material and institutional ways. (Below I discuss why prostitution is a stand-in for gender in this study.) What I mean is that when we examine the history of regulated prostitution most broadly, we can see that the modern state has, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, been concerned with establishing a particular system of gender relations. And, as officials have made decisions about reordering the system of gender relations, the state itself has been transformed.

Regulated prostitution was part of the modern state model passed from Europe to China; this means that concerns about gender and (particularly women’s) sexuality were an integral part of the modern state from its origins in Napoleonic France until it made its way to China during the early 1900s via the New Policy–era police reforms.¹ After all, what could be more state-like than Paris’s enormous Morals Police bureaucracy, prostitutes’ prisons, and hospitals? Protecting public health and keeping order in the streets by controlling prostitutes were modernist statebuilding goals. European state-makers created modern states based on particular assumptions and understandings about gender; and one of the many things they sought to control in the new modern way was gender and sexuality, as Foucault (1988–1990) has so famously pointed out. When Chinese state-makers started regulating prostitution as they adopted modern police systems, they were also drawn into the business of having the state intervene actively, openly, and in new ways in gender relations and issues related to women’s sexuality.

Prostitution was also a state concern in China in the early part of the twentieth century because prostitution and its regulation were political, politicized, and public, rather than marginal private matters. Prostitution was public in that, in many places in the country, the business was openly conducted and thriving. Urban men of the middle and upper classes routinely went to brothels not only for sex, but also to do business and socialize with each other while gambling, eating, and drinking. Some prostitutes were leaders in fashion and purveyors of taste. The press reported frequently about prostitutes and prostitution both in news stories and as the topic of public debates. In public discourse, talking about prostitution—what caused it and what should be done about it—was a vehicle for discussing a whole host of hot topics of the day: the sources of China’s national weakness, feminism and gender roles, colonialism and imperialism, reform vs. revolution, and so on. Prostitution was a metaphor, a medium of articulation in which . . . changing elites and emerging middle classes discussed their problems, fears, agendas, and visions (Hershatter 1997, 4). But importantly, the discussions were decidedly political and had political causes and consequences. Military and civilian officials, as well as provincial and municipal legislators, often had opinions about prostitution and tried to act on those opinions when they had the political power to do so. In short, people talked about, wrote about, read about, and even saw prostitutes with regularity, and prostitution was the subject of political discussion and the object of political action.

The fact that concerns about prostitution and gender are shot through conceptions of the modern state, local politics, and political discourse tells us that we need to think about how to write gender more explicitly into political history, in China and elsewhere. In Chinese studies, gender is usually written out of political history; even in supposedly more liberated Republican political history, men are (generally speaking) the actors, and we rarely hear anything about women, or about gender as a broad political concern. This makes one wonder, as Cynthia Enloe, the feminist scholar of international relations, always asks about international politics, Where are the women? (Enloe 1989). And, since we do not hear much from women, what were the male actors saying and doing about gender? What effects did their actions regarding gender have on the construction of the modern local state in China?

Feminist histories of late Qing and Republican China do have some answers about the first two questions. Some women were visible in the public sphere as activists and revolutionaries (Gilmartin 1995), and as fighters for women’s rights and suffrage during the Republican era (Edwards 2008). But more often than not, women were the objects of political campaigns, not the instigators of them. Recent studies have shown that the warlord and Guomindang regimes were deeply implicated in reordering gender relations, whether it was through defining civil and property rights based on gender (Bernhardt 1999), restructuring and redefining the family (Glosser 2003), controlling women’s dress (Friedman 2002), creating schools for girls, regulating women’s labor and banning women from taking certain kinds of presumably sexualized work (Chin 2012; Hsu Hui-chi 2008), or banning foot binding and other kinds of cultural practices viewed as particularly connected to women, such as popular religion (Nedostup 2009; Poon 2004). Furthermore, outside the official sphere, many of the leading nationalist advocates for women’s equality were men, such as Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Kang Youwei, and Lu Xun.

But how state actors dealt with gender issues also had an important political impact. In late Qing and Republican China, not only did the state intervene in gender-related issues through policymaking, but the state itself was transformed by the decisions related to gender. That is, in making choices about men and women’s relative power, and about how to create a properly ordered gendered society, the state gained or lost certain capacities, and gained or lost certain bureaucratic structures and functions, including some in areas not directly connected to the gender-related policies.

To consider some concrete examples beyond the regulation of prostitution, there are logical institutional consequences from all sorts of gender-related official decisions. If local government officials decide to educate girls as well as boys when they set up public schools, then they must either devote more resources to larger coeducational schools or establish separate schools for boys and girls. If they decide that it is right, proper, or simply necessary for women to work outside the home, then they have to provide public supports to help women with traditionally female domestic duties such as child care. If they decide to criminalize new kinds of female sexual behavior, they must establish women’s prisons or reformatories or expand existing ones. The point is that if we look at statebuilding through the lens of gender, we can see that local states would be structured and would function differently, if officials made different choices about gender.

One could similarly look at statebuilding from any number of other perspectives; for example, we might ask how local states would look different if officials made different choices about class, race/ethnic identity, sexual orientation, or other categories. Certainly these viewpoints will not tell us everything there is to know about statebuilding, but they do fill in some gaps in a literature that focuses on the power of capital and the importance of warfare in making states, in the case of Europe (Tilly 1992), and on moral, material, and coercive power in the case of China (Wong 1997). In early twentieth-century China, local government’s treatment of prostitution had important fiscal consequences, bureaucratic consequences, and social reform consequences. These are all things that political and social historians should care about, and why prostitution deserves to be a focus of study in Republican-era politics in China.

WHY IS PROSTITUTION ABOUT GENDER?

So far I have asked readers to accept my claim that prostitution is in some sense about gender, and that prostitution can be a stand-in for gender in my discussion of the interactions between state and gender; but this claim deserves further investigation. We usually assume that prostitution is about sex, but is it necessarily about gender? I would not argue that it always is, in all times and places; but in late Qing and Republican China, prostitution was a very important component of the overall system of gender relations, and regulating it was one way that the state influenced gender roles and gendered behavior. What it meant to be a prostitute in late Qing and Republican China was connected with, and partly constitutive of, the larger system of gender relations.

There are many ways to think about and define prostitution, which we usually take to mean the practice of trading sex for money or other kinds of material gain. Whether we think it is good or bad, or neither, our evaluation of it tends to be influenced by what we think causes it—that is, what makes people sell sex. Less talked about is what makes people buy sex, but more on that later. The actors in this study variously talked about prostitution as being a sign of a woman’s moral weakness, personal degradation, or individual criminality; as an economic expedient that desperately poor women were forced to undertake at their most vulnerable times; or as an inevitable outcome of the capitalist (or, sometimes, feudal) system of patriarchal marriage. Today, these same understandings persist, now accompanied by newer framings of prostitution as a positive, transgressive form of sexuality, or as a form of labor (sex work).²

Because I find it most analytically useful, my approach is to view it as a kind of labor, in particular a kind of service work that is usually highly stigmatized. The experiences and circumstances of those who sell sex, and the specific kinds of work that they do, are so varied that I see little point in trying to characterize them as being uniform in any way other than that they all in some way exchange sexual labor for money. For some people the exchange is voluntary, for some it is not, and for still others it is something in between. For some there is agency and choice in selecting clients and working conditions, and for others there is not. For some there is purely an exchange of sex for cash, and for others there is a courtship ritual and a personal relationship. All of these things depend on what kind of sex work people do.

To put it in the Chinese context of the time, the life and work experiences of a high-class courtesan were very different from that of a pheasant (streetwalker), an opium/brothel-shed prostitute, a tour guide, or a waitress, because of their different locations in the hierarchy of prostitution.³ Some entered prostitution because they were sold or pawned by their parents or kidnapped by traffickers, some because they were running away from a situation they thought was worse than doing sex work, some because it was a way to earn money for their husbands and children, some because they were born into it by virtue of their membership in a pariah social group, and probably even some because they hoped for a glamorous life. Courtesans often had a luxurious material life and some social status, while streetwalkers lived on the edge. Some courtesans claimed they did not sell sex at all, only providing entertainment such as dancing, singing, and reciting or writing poetry for their clients, while prostitutes working on the lower rungs of the hierarchy often had sexual intercourse with multiple partners over the course of a day. And yet they were all considered prostitutes, jinü, although the courtesans who did not have intercourse with their patrons would almost certainly not have considered themselves sex workers.

So, what was a prostitute in late Qing and Republican times? There were several attributes that might cause a woman to be officially classified as, or considered socially to be, a prostitute. She was a prostitute if she had sex for money with men to whom she was not married or formally connected through concubinage—in other words, she acted like a conventional sex worker; if she interacted socially with, and entertained in public, men to whom she was not married; if she lived and worked outside a domestic familial space in a place designated as a brothel and entertained clients (i.e., was not a servant or other kind of worker); or if she was registered as a prostitute with the police. All female entertainers were thus considered fairly close to being prostitutes, and many female workers were not considered respectable because, like prostitutes, they were working outside of domestic space. Any of the other attributes almost automatically caused a woman to be considered a prostitute.

Prostitution as it was practiced in late Qing and Republican China was highly gendered, and many aspects of its practice are only comprehensible if we put them in the larger context of gender relations. To begin with, the only visible kinds of prostitution consisted of a female prostitute selling sex and/or other kinds of entertainment to male customers. What of male prostitutes and female customers? By the late Qing, the once-flourishing business of male prostitutes, serving male clients, had for the most part been driven underground so deeply that virtually no record of it exists. Before the end of the nineteenth century, male prostitutes were quite common, especially in Beijing, but also in Guangzhou and other big cities (Jiang Jianguo 2006, 54; Shan Guangnai 1995, 96–97). After that time, male prostitution was harshly suppressed, and certainly not registered or regulated; and I have never seen any reference to it in any official documents from the Republican period. Guidebooks and newspapers rarely mentioned it; indeed I have found only a single reference to male prostitution in a 1920s travelogue mentioning in passing that male prostitutes could be found in some expensive Guangzhou hotels (Xie Bin 1934, 15). As Sommer (2000) notes, the disappearance of open male prostitution was part of the gradual criminalization of male-male sex in the late Qing. A female clientele for either male or female prostitutes was simply unimaginable. The upshot is that when we talk about prostitution in late Qing and Republican China, we are invariably discussing female prostitutes and male clients.

Another way in which prostitution was gendered has to do with what men and women did to demonstrate that