Past the terrible details set at a drab spa on the edge of an industrial park in central China, the incident raised troubling questions in the minds of residents: Did government officials and their associates provide protection to the Water Cube? Were they among the customers who paid cash to rape local girls?

The Legal Daily carried allegations of some 10 instances of unnamed officials and well-known citizens in Chengguan paying for sex with young prostitutes at the Water Cube in the spring of 2010. The club, named for the Olympic aquatics center in Beijing, is one intersection away from a police station.

Hard feelings over local mandarins and their corrupt dealings are commonplace in China. But the fact that suspicions extend to something as grotesque as schoolgirl prostitution is the sort of development that causes concern in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s far from obvious, though, how the central leadership will manage such tensions amid complaints of privilege and cash trumping the law.

Read more about the unchecked power of local officials in China, via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, local power, prostitution, rape
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Since at least the 1980s, kidnapping and human trafficking have become a problem in China, and most often, the victims are children. Estimates vary on just how bad things have gotten. The Chinese government reports that fewer than 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, but the U.S. State Department says it’s closer to 20,000. Some independent estimates put the number as high as 70,000 (compared with 100 to 200 children kidnapped per year in the United States, for example).

The vast majority of kidnapped children will never see their families again. In China, kids are abducted not for ransom but for sale. Often, they come from poor and rural families — the families least likely to be capable of tracking their kids down or fighting back. Some children are then sold to new “adoptive” families looking for children. Others are sold into slave labor, prostitution, or a life on the streets. In some cases, healthy children are brutally crippled by handlers on the theory that a child with broken legs or horrific boils looks sadder and can earn more money begging on the street.

Some children are even sold into adoption overseas. Chinese adoption agencies seeking the substantial donations foreign parents make when they adopt — in some cases, as much as $5,000 — have been known to purchase children from human traffickers, though these cases appear to be relatively rare.

Custer describes one case in a guest post at Danwei:

By the time Liu Jingjun was two, the parents had decided they didn’t want more children, and both had operations to ensure there would be no further pregnancies. Shortly after this, Liu Jingjun was kidnapped.

On April 11, 2010, Mr. Liu went to work and his wife stayed home to watch the children. Jingjun, who was not even two at the time, was outside in the alley playing with some older neighborhood children, and his mother was inside the apartment. Around 10:30 A.M., she went to look for Jingjun and discovered he was missing. She called Liu, who came home, and together they called the police.

The police did come, but told them to calm down and have a look around themselves, assuring them that the child had probably just wandered off or been taken into some neighbor’s house. So the couple searched on their own until the evening, when Mr. Liu discovered one of his neighbors had a surveillance camera with an unobstructed view of the alley. He got his neighbor to let him review the recordings and watched in horror as he saw a man walk onscreen, grab his son, and carry him into a van at the end of the alley.

Custer is working on a film, ‘Living With Dead Hearts‘, about child kidnapping in China, and is currently seeking funding to continue production. Please take five minutes to view the following pitch and trailer, and share it widely:

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adoption, beggars, child trafficking, children, kidnapping, prostitution
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A man who allegedly kept six women as sex slaves in a dungeon for two years and killed two of them in a central China city has been sacked from his post and stripped of his Party membership.

Li Hao was fired from the inspection team under the Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision of Luoyang, Henan Province, after he was detained for forcing the women into prostitution and to feature in porno videos uploaded on the Internet to make money, Guangzhou Daily reported today.

Yu Hongwen, Li’s supervisor and head of the inspection team, was also suspended.

The reporter who unveiled the case has taken issue with the New York Times’ account of local authorities’ subsequent actions. From the Index on Censorship:

The journalist in question, Ji Xuguang, posted a message on Weibo saying that, contrary to online rumours, he had not been “arrested” (although his previous Weibo postings stated he had indeed been accused of revealing state secrets). Yet the term “arrested” was never used in the New York Times’ article: Jacobs stuck with “detained”.

In an email conversation, the article’s author, Andrew Jacobs, told me that the issue boils down to a “parsing of language.” … Jacobs added he believed Ji had been “detained” in the sense that “he was not allowed to waltz away from his questioners, which is why he asked his Weibo followers for help.” […]

“[Ji] said he was sorry if his “Weibo clarification” had caused us any trouble, but he had to tweet his clarification because the Henan authorities were using this “dispute” against him. He said he was hauled out of bed by his boss early one morning because Henan authorities accused him of getting the New York Times to exaggerate the story, so he had to come out and tell the truth, which is that he was not arrested.”

The New York Times was also accused in March of exaggerating the extent of telephone monitoring in China. The newspaper’s dramatic anecdote about a call being disconnected in response to an innocuous Shakespeare quote quickly took flight across the Internet and morphed into, for example, “Chinese censorware nukes any voicecall that contains the word ‘protest’“. Numerous attempts to reproduce the disconnection failed, however.

People’s Daily, meanwhile, reports that a Beijing lawyer was wrongly identified as Li Hao by a TV news report:

Shangdong Television used the picture of Wang Jin, of Beijing City Linkzone Law Firm, in a news program about the sex slave scandal last Friday, claiming the face was that of suspect Li Hao ….

Wang said: “I received numerous calls from friends and relatives asking me whether I had any relationship with the case and the suspect.”

He said his picture was available only on the law firm’s website alongside his name and an introduction, so using it wrongly was carelessness on the part of the TV station.

He said: “They must have picked the picture randomly from the Internet and used it because a picture of the suspect is unavailable.”

Luoyang police have apologised for failing to end the abducted women’s captivity sooner. From CNN:

Police didn’t act and raid Li’s home, until September 3 after one of the supposed “sex slaves” escaped and one of her relatives talked with police.

On Saturday, Guo Congbin — who directs the public security bureau in Luoyang, which is in Henan province — said the lag time between when Li began abducting the women and police discovered him indicates that community patrols were ineffective and police had lost their sense of responsibility.

He noted four police officers have been suspended; entertainment venues, Internet cafes, beauty parlors, saunas and the like are being more closely examined; and an “online cleansing” effort is targeting porn websites.

“I beg the people of Luoyang to give us another chance,” Guo said. “We will show you the results of our actions.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Henan, kidnapping, Luoyang, murder, new york times, police, pornography, prostitution, rape
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Ye Haiyan was nabbed at the offices of her community group, the China Women’s Rights Workshops, and told she would be held for two or three days of “studies,” her sister, Ye Sha, told The Associated Press.

Dissidents in China are often detained by authorities with the explanation that they are “going for studies” or “taking a vacation.” Usually, they are kept at a guesthouse to prevent them from moving about freely during sensitive dates.

Last week, Ye Haiyan and a few supporters asked people in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where she is based, to sign a petition in support of legalizing prostitution, according to an account on her group’s website. She also called for Aug. 3 – Tuesday – to be marked as “Sex Workers’ Day.”

Ye Haiyan argued that making prostitution legal would afford sex workers better protections.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: prostitution, sex industry
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Investigator: What’s your name?
Escort: You call me seven times a day and you’re asking me?
Investigator: … so Zhang Xiaohong, where do you work?
Escort: You go there seven times a week and you’re asking me?
Investigator:… so Zhang Xiaohong, how long have you been working at the Passion?
Escort: You came in on the very first day I started to work last year and you’re asking me?
Investigator: … so Zhang Xiaohong, in the year you have worked at the Passion, how many clients have you had and who are they?
Escort: How many people are in the government, you’re asking me?

审讯员：你叫什么名字
小姐：我的电话你一天打七次，你问我？
审讯员：。。。。。。
审讯员：那张小红，你在哪里工作？
小姐：你一周去七次，你问我？
审讯员：。。。。。。
审讯员：那张小红，你在天上人间工作多长时间了？
小姐：我去年第一天上班你就来了，你问我？
审讯员：。。。。。。
审讯员：那张小红，你在天上人间这一年多中接了多少客，都有谁？
小姐：你们z F有多少人，你问我？
审讯员：。。。。。。

On Kaixin Net, a Facebook-like social networking service, users responded to the above joke by offering their own short comment or voting on the comments of others. Below are some of the most popular comments posted about this post:

A total of 20,123 users** expressed their views on this item

Police and the people enjoying each other! 7272 36.1%
Every sentence is true 3970 19.7%
Sharp girl 1927 9.5%
You’re asking me? 1842 9%
[Investigator] can write it up by himself 1233 6.1%
The government is deep into the society 815 4%
Harmonious society 711 3.5%
Give thanks to the Communist Party first 638 3.1%
True picture of the government 249 1.2%
Thanks to the State 246 1.2%
Haha this is classic 236 1.1%

* Thanks to a reader of CDT corrected the translation. The original post translated the name of the nightclub as “Heaven and Earth.”

**as of the time of posting

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: online public opinion, political satire, prostitution
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Zhao Qingmei was put to death in Guizhou province “in recent days” after her final appeal was rejected, the Guizhou Daily reported.

Zhao was convicted with six others of forcing the 22 pupils, some of whom may have been as young as six, and an older girl into prostitution in the impoverished mountainous province from March to June 2006, the paper said… The report said the other defendants, including Zhao’s husband, were given sentences ranging from jail time, including life sentences, to death with a two-year reprieve, a punishment normally commuted to life in prison.

China annually executes more people than the rest of the world combined, last year putting to death more than 1,700 people out of a global total of almost 2,400, according to Amnesty International.

© cschultz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: child abuse, execution, human trafficking, prostitution
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Later, however, it was revealed that the post was not written by prostitute Yan Deli, but a disgruntled ex-boyfriend with the surname Yang. Yan tested negative for HIV. But the hoax raises questions about personal privacy on the Internet. From China Daily:

A blog that falsely proclaimed that a Hebei province woman is HIV positive was a hoax by an ex-boyfriend intent upon revenge – and a case study into the debate about people’s right of privacy in cyberspace.

The woman, Yan Deli, a native in Hebei province, tested negative for HIV/AIDS Monday by the local disease control center.

[...] The hoax has caused worries about the violation of privacy in the virtual world, and raised questions about how much the blogger and the websites should be held responsible.

Yu Guofu, a lawyer with Beijing Sam & Partners Law Firm, said the blogger will face legal consequences, because the violators of laws in the virtual world – an extension of the real world – should be punished as well.

But the difference, Yu said, is how quickly illegal content can be spread on the Internet, and how difficult it is to collect proof of a crime on the Internet.

Read also a blog post by Chang Ping on the subject of privacy and defamation on the Internet [CN].

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hoaxes, Internet privacy, privacy rights, prostitution, Yan Deli
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A brief introduction to the Beibei Wenquan Temple in Chongqing: the Wenquan temple and its first master were established in the first year of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (423 A.D.), and is linked to the Mahayana sect. It has gone through the tides of great changes through the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties. … Past notable figures include Hui Guan, Cheng Pin, Chang Tai, Da Fang, Xiang Yan, Long Shu, and so on. The Wenquan temple is a famous temple in the area, having thorough teachings and traditional instruction on Buddhist thought.

重庆北碚温泉寺简介：温泉寺于慈应禅师创建于南北朝景平元年（公元423年），属大乘佛教临济宗。历经唐、宋、元、明、清，沧桑兴废 … 历代高僧有慧灌、成聘、常泰、大方、香延、隆树等。温泉寺为川东名刹，教化四方之所，传承法脉之地。

Recently however, the temple’s auspicious location has attracted some attention, and some desire to transform the temple into Chongqing’s largest relaxation and vice establishment, or a “bathhouse.” Several moneyed and coarse capitalists, in collusion with corrupt local officials, have staged the world’s biggest joke: it uses the Wenquan temple as its building material, a bathhouse as its front, and prostitution as its aim.

而如今，有人看上了这一方风水宝地，欲在这里建重庆最大的休闲色情场所，“洗浴中心”。几个财大气粗的资本家，在勾结当地腐败官员后，上演了本世纪最大的笑话……用温泉做料，洗浴为名，情色交易为主。

The temple received some pro bono counsel from those who tried to understand their situation. But in my decades of experiences in this society, they don’t have much hope; it’s inconceivable that they’d get very far. Perhaps after one phone call, the shadow of their simple lives could disappear without a trace.

法律界人士在了解情况，准备无偿为寺院提供法律援助。但以我几十年的社会经验，对此并不抱有太大的希望，无法想象他们能走多远。或许只须一个电话，他们单薄的身影就会消失的无影无踪。

The Religious Affairs Management has used “inspection” as an excuse, persisting in disrupting the temple’s normal order.

宗教管理部门以“调研”为借口，坚持干扰佛寺正常宗教秩序。

These are some precious [Song Dynasty] Buddhist cultural artifacts. Take one more look at them — they are hidden by the large road to the bathhouse, and no one knows what their fate will be.

The final era of culture. Aside from the government’s influence, what else will we sacrifice on the road for our so-called economic development? After 100 years, how will later generations criticize our period of history?

这些都是国宝级的佛教文物
　　再看一眼他们吧
　　因为它们正好挡在情色洗浴扩张的大路上，没人知道它们的命运…
　　文化的断代，除了政治的因素之外，还要牺牲在所谓的经济建设的道路上吗？
　　百年后，后人该怎么评说这段历史？

Aside from seriously hurting the Buddhists’ feelings, the cover-up of the illegal behavior ironically coincides with the second session of the World Buddhist Forum in Wuxi. Thousands of monks from 56 countries will assemble to talk about “Harmonious Society, Unity of the Multitudes.” This is a serious provocation of the country’s religious policies and Buddhist interests!

而如此严重的损害佛教徒宗教感情，侵吞佛教教产的违法行为却发生在第二届世界佛教论坛在中国无锡盛大举行的时候，来自56个国家的僧团及数千名佛教徒聚集无锡梵宫畅谈“和谐世界，众缘和合”之际。是对国家宗教政策和佛教利益的严重挑衅！

The regional authority’s important “written comments,” that was authorization for the [bathhouse plan] implementation.

区级领导的重要“批示”，并且开始执行。

Do you dare to look upon the State Council’s religious policies?

而这些国务院的宗教政策文件你们敢看吗？

Update: We have changed the headline and introduction to this post, which previously implied that the entire temple would be demolished. We thank Xujun Eberlein for pointing this out, and for providing additional details about the fate of the Beibei Wenquan Temple.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bathhouses, Buddhism, Chongqing, prostitution
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China’s rapid economic growth over the last two decades has seen the emergence of many new industries, including the sex industry. This pod explores this issue through eyes of two male prostitutes, immersed in this secret world.

See also Video: China Sex Workers, via Current.com

© Sophia Cao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: prostitution, sex industry, videos
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Four Chinese men have been jailed for up to 5- years for running a male prostitution service that sold sex to other men, state media said Wednesday.

Zheng Shuyi registered the website nannanboy.com — the word “nan” being Chinese for “man” — and advertised it as a spa, but he used it to recruit male prostitutes, the official Xinhua news agency said on its website (www.xinhuanet.com).

He then hired two rooms and sold sex for up to 400 yuan ($60) a session, the report said.

The prostitutes, based in the eastern province of Zhejiang, “went when they were called and offered their services,” it added.

Read also Male prostitution ring smashed in Zhejiang from Forgotten Archipelagoes.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: prostitution
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