Human Rights Watch says they interviewed women who told of violence by police and of being detained following sex with undercover police officers. One anonymous woman cited in the report said she and two colleagues were assaulted by police who “attached us to trees, threw freezing cold water on us, and then proceeded to beat us.”

Other problems are arbitrary detention of sex workers and discrimination by law enforcement officials when sex workers try to report crimes or abuse, the report said. It focused on women primarily in Beijing who engage in sex work on the streets, in public places such as parks, and in massage parlors and hair salons. While Chinese law treats most sex work-related offences as administrative violations, punishable by fines and short periods of police custody or detention, it allows for administrative detention of up to two years for repeat offenders.

In most of East Asia, prostitution is embedded in a business and political culture of entertaining clients and partners in karaoke bars and nightclubs. Prostitution also is illegal in Japan, but legal gray areas still allow it to flourish. South Korea toughened its anti-prostitution laws in 2004, driving thousands of prostitutes and pimps out of business, although the industry there remains widespread. Still, the level of police abuse against sex workers is deemed lower in those two countries in part because of a stronger rule of law.

“There is a much more robust legal system in both Japan and South Korea so this offers in the first place a greater protection for women who engage in sex work,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Of course you don’t have the kind of limitations on right to expression and right to assembly and so on that you face in China, which is also contributing to this climate enabling these abuses.” [Source]

In China, the frequent crackdowns on prostitution make the problem worse without making a significant dent in the industry, according to the report. From the Guardian:

Authorities have launched frequent drives against the sex industry, but it remains widespread and visible. While such campaigns see hundreds of women rounded up, brothels often continue to operate with little obvious difficulty.

While there have been hints of change in the government’s approach – three years ago the ministry of public security ordered an end to the public shaming of sex workers and said they should be treated more respectfully – problems remain widespread.

“The anti-prostitution drives are useless in terms of controlling the industry, but they lead to a spike in abuses,” said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch and one of the report’s authors.

Several interviewees said they had been assaulted by police or by auxiliary workers. Others reported police entrapping them or extorting sex. [Source]

Read the full report here via HRW.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: prostitution, rape, sex workers
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Richard is the author of the long-lived Peking Duck blog, which he began in 2002. “I never meant for anybody to read it,” he told CDT in a recent interview. As the SARS outbreak began to gather international attention in 2003, so did Richard’s blog. “I was overwhelmed with what I saw, I couldn’t believe a country’s leaders would lie to its people saying there was no SARS in Beijing. I began to write about that nonstop.” The reflections he’s recorded on his ten-plus year blogroll have made him a trusted scribe – with 3.5 million collective visitors, The Peking Duck attracts about 600 unique hits each day. The blog continues to analyze China and all of its contradictions, and has long been a popular virtual discussion space for China experts and the casually curious alike. “I try to see china in a tolerant way, and not simply write the country off as bad, in spite of all the negative material the Chinese Communist Party gives me to work with.”

From unprecedented sexual openness and licensed prostitution under the Tang dynasty, to party-promoted androgyny and fear of homosexuality under Mao, to the 13-million estimated annual abortions under the CCP’s one-child policy, the state is as recurring a character in the book as are prostitutes, sexologists, sex toy peddlers and concubines. “While the government has done its part to encourage this revolution – for example encouraging sex help hotlines in Shanghai – the state still draws the line in the sand, and the censors are very aggressive as to what they deem ‘spiritual pollution’.” But the state is not the only entity lending to the obscurity of today’s revolution.

The book could be edifying and enjoyable to both the seasoned China-hand and the relaxed reader. After Richard set on this task at the request of Earnshaw Books, he quickly realized that there was no mainstream book offering a panoramic history of China from ancient times to today that could be read by people who weren’t scholars and professors. “I wanted a book that could be read by anybody, but would at the same time be detailed, and hopefully, insightful.”

Behind the Red Door hasn’t been translated into Chinese, and according to the author likely won’t see that rendering: “The problem is, it’s quite critical of the government, and it’s quite sexually graphic at times. I won’t be holding my breath.” While Richard said that he’s sent the book to mainland-based Chinese bloggers, who offered positive feedback, the candid material in the book, the language in which it’s written, and its framing – with the sexual revolution of the western world constantly serving as a point of contrast - seem intent on limiting the work to an English-speaking audience.

“No society has swung more dramatically from extreme sexual openness to prudish orthodoxy and then to the sexually ambiguous atmosphere we see at present,” writes Richard in the book’s introduction. Drawing from the extensive existing body of scholastic work to cover the obscure – for example, an academic study of the sex lives of “sent down youth” during the cultural revolution, the book also examines the current zeitgeist by citing coverage from the mainstream and state-owned press – a realm that Richard is very familiar with after years covering the country on his blog. Interviews conducted either by Richard or by publisher-hired researchers are scattered liberally, lending a practical credence and enhancing the book’s readability.

Each of seven chapters tackles a specific issue that lends to the current and confusing sexual revolution. The book closes with the author’s parting thoughts, as he strives to make sense of sexuality in China today, and tries at the tortuous task of predicting where it will be tomorrow.

“The final chapter was torture to write. One point that I am trying to make is that, even though there is undoubtedly a sexual revolution occurring, it is not necessarily liberating. This is a very different revolution than was seen in the West,” Richard remarked in our interview.  “Whether this will lead to greater personal freedoms and self expression, acceptance of the human body, I can’t predict that. The best I can say is that, based on the trajectory of other countries that have experienced a sexual revolution, China will slowly but surely continue to open up sexually. But, they’ve still a long way to go, and you never know what might happen in the meantime.”

For more on Behind the Red Door, see reviews from Salon, The Independent, Global Times and Shanghai City Weekend. To hear the author talking about homosexuality in China, see a podcast he put together on the subject. Also, head over to Danwei.com to read a “Sex in China Q&A” with Richard Burger.

And of course, follow Richard’s musings on contemporary China at his blog The Peking Duck, and join in on the discussion.

Also see CDT coverage of some of the topics that contribute to China’s “sexually ambiguous atmosphere”: homosexuality and gay rights, birth control, sex education, STDs and HIV/AIDS, sex bloggers, prostitution, marriage, sex scandals, family planning, and the sex industry, to name a few.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book reviews, gay rights, homosexuality, prostitution, sex, sex industry
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“Our company has delivery stations in every part of China,” boasts one Chinese-language Web site, with photos of illegal narcotics it sells. “We offer 24-hour delivery service to your door, and we have long-term and consistent supplies. If you just make one phone call, we’ll deliver to your hands in one to five hours.”

Another Chinese Web site offers meth wholesale for $19,700 a kilo, or deliveries to your door of smaller quantities in hundreds of cities around China. Even in remote Anhui Province, it delivers drugs in 21 different cities.

All this is completely illegal in China, where narcotics traffickers are routinely executed. But it doesn’t seem to be a top government priority, because these Web sites aren’t even closed down or blocked. Tens of thousands of censors delete references to human rights, but they ignore countless Chinese Web sites peddling drugs, guns or prostitutes.

Doesn’t it seem odd that China blocks Facebook, YouTube and The New York Times but shrugs at, say, guns?

Meanwhile, for Motherboard, Eveline Chao reports on the growing problem of methamphetamine production and use in China. As portrayed by the popular U.S. television show “Breaking Bad,” Mexico is the source of most of the meth in the U.S. But China is increasingly responsible for providing the chemicals that are used in the making of the drug:

Records of large drug busts involving meth in recent years–an increasingly common occurrence–tend to show a trail that leads back to China. Last January, the Mexican navy announced that a single bust had yielded 195 tons of meth chemicals in a Chinese shipment, following a six-week period that netted an additional 900 tons of precursor chemicals. In April, three tons of methylamine chloride, a chemical used in pharmaceuticals and pesticides, was found at LAX in a shipment from China; it was on its way to Mexico, where it was bound to be cooked into $40 million of methamphetamine for American consumers. The list gets longer.

American officials now estimate that 80 percent of the meth consumed in the US is Mexican-made–with ingredients from China. “The rising threat of new synthetic drugs requires a truly international response, and we look forward to extending our cooperative work with China to address the dangers that these substances pose to the citizens of both our countries,” Berit Hallberg, a spokesman for the White House’s drug czar, said in a statement to Stars and Stripes. James Rendon, the Coast Guard Rear Admiral in charge of the DoD’s Joint Interagency Task Force West, described the meth-from-China problem more simply: “It is a big problem, and it is getting bigger.”

In China–where crystal meth is generally called 冰 bing, or ice, and “doing meth” is called 溜冰 liu bing, or “ice skating”–the meth picture is a mirror image of that of the US. Both are large countries pocked with wide-open spaces that are ideal for homemade recipes of the smelly, noxious, explosive stuff. Whether you’re in Indiana or Shanxi, it’s in these rural spaces where meth consumption is most rampant, not least because it’s cheap and offers a lot of bang for your buck–users report a high that, unlike coke, lasts for hours.

Last week, NBC News reported on a drug bust in China which found almost 200 pounds of methamphetamines:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: drug addiction, drug trafficking, drugs, Gun laws, Internet control, nicholas kristof, prostitution
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[… T]he book’s greatest strength is in carving out a distinctive story for China — and showing that analogies to the Western 1960s sexual revolution are misleading. The Chinese are not so much shedding the mantle of history, Burger illustrates, as they are rediscovering their country’s past. And that past includes a sexual openness that puts the West to shame.

[…] As Chinese embrace their rediscovered sexual freedom, the notion that carnality is a foreign import is an increasingly difficult sell. Beginning in 1993, the government allowed the establishment of sex stores, provided they maintained an ostensibly medical focus. Employees at Adam and Eve, the first establishment in Beijing, wore white lab coats and counseled customers on cures for erectile dysfunction. Today, China is reportedly home to 200,000 sex stores, and dried deer penis and other traditional medicines have been supplemented by lifelike sex dolls and French maid costumes. Chinese factories now produce around 70 percent of the world’s sex toys — a feat that the public is invited to admire every year at the Guangzhou National Sex Culture Festival. This year’s event, held in early October, drew 250,000 visitors.

[… A]s an explanation of the dueling forces within Chinese society, Behind the Red Door is spot-on. Among the book’s more delicious details is the list of seven categories of sex worker devised by Chinese police in the 1990s. My former downstairs neighbors fall into tier five — falangmei, literally “hair salon sisters” — a trade slightly more desirable, apparently, than walking the street or servicing migrant workers at construction sites. The copious detail with which officials characterized sex work establishments betrays more than passing knowledge of the trade. And yet the list also suggests a certain innocence — a pragmatic approach to sex in a culture where it has been intermittently criminalized but not indelibly branded as immoral, a culture that will never have the same tortured relationship to contraception, or gay sex, or sexual fantasy that we do in the United States. May no one ever again evoke China’s sexual landscape and the Summer of Love in the same breath.

See also Evan Osnos’ brave examination of China’s recent string of political sex scandals, via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: gender, prostitution, sex, sex industry, taoism, traditional culture
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Today’s Hot Topics:

• intranet (内联网): Iran has announced a program to move away from the Internet towards establishing a state intranet that will adhere to Islamic law.
• Great Firewall (防火长城): Netizens are comparing Iran’s planned intranet to China’s Great Firewall.
• prostitution (卖淫): The daughter of Tang Hui was kidnapped and prostituted in 2006.
• Economic Observer + seize (经济观察报+查封): Beijing denies that copies of the Economic Observer were seized because of its reporting on the Beijing flood.

Other:

• Celestial Empire (兲朝): Alternate writing of Celestial Empire (天朝). The original word (i.e. without the character 兲) has not been blocked.
• evil spirit (邪灵)

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results.

CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, beijing flood 2012, censorship, economic observer, filtered keywords, Great Firewall, intranet, Iran, netizens, prostitution, Sensitive Words Series, sina weibo, Tang Hui, weibo
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[...]In order to keep their customers coming, most of these women here don’t use condoms — not to mention these things could be evidence of prostitution. Wu Xianfang sometimes uses them, and sometimes doesn’t, and in her own words, “you can tell if they have a disease or not”, her simple standard for detection being : those whose appearances are clean probably don’t carry any diseases, but must be cautious with those who in shabbier clothes.

Wu Xianfang has never had a gynecological examination. A gynecological examination costs thirty kuai, an amount she has receive three customers and risk being caught three times to earn. When her body feels unusual, she takes a bus to the country and has an infusion called “inflammation shot”, which costs over twentykuai, is said to be penicillin, and as soon as the inflammation goes down, she immediately begins working again.

After the past five to six years, Wu Xianfang has become accustomed to this kind of life. She’s very diligent. Her “working hours” are from 8:00 in the morning to 9:30 at night and unless there’s a situation requiring her to return home, she works all year without a break. As time goes by, she’s gotten used to it, gotten numb about it, as doing this kind of work “is just like going into the fields to farm”.[...]

Set in the same squalid conditions of a “10-yuan brothel”, Paul Mooney tells the story of Ye Haiyan. Ye is an AIDS and sex-worker’s rights activist who, in effort to fully understand those whom she advocates for and the conditions in which they live, works by their side. From The Daily Beast:

Ye Haiyan, the occupant of the small room, does not look like one of the regulars here, a group that is mostly made up of older prostitutes in their 40s and 50s. Actually, Ye, 37, is a well-known advocate for the rights of sex workers and AIDS victims, and she came here in January to get a first-hand feel for the lives of the young women she’s been defending for years, and to show her compassion for the many poor men who frequent such brothels. Her commitment is such that she actually has sex with customers the way the prostitutes would.

Sitting in a small Beijing hotel room earlier this month after returning from a sex workers conference in the United States, Ye says that when she was younger, she was never biased against sex workers—feeling they were “just trying to make a living”—but at the same time, never thought much about their plight or their low position in society.

After getting a divorce from her husband, the single mother, along with her young daughter, took up an offer to stay at the home of several sex workers in 2003. It was here that she began to hear the sad stories of these young women. The experience prompted her to start a website in 2005 to speak out for sex workers.

Click through to read Ye’s entire story in The Daily Beast.

A Global Times piece from earlier this summer discusses the controversial nature of Ye’s activism.

The first time she became a sex worker was in 2009 when she was investigating the online part-time sex trade. She served about six people in a month and earned 1,500 yuan.

“It took a lot of courage,” she recalled. “Then I asked myself, if they can do it to make a living, why can’t I? I need to feel their pain and suffering.”

Many people think her behavior is “crazy and immoral.” Some support her work in general but have mixed feelings about her decision to experience it herself. But she seems determined.

Ye uses her experience to educate a society that looks down on sex-workers. She blogs under the name Hooligan Swallow (流氓燕). See her iFeng blog, QQ profile, or Twitter [zh].

For more on China’s sex-trade, see prior CDT coverage.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AIDS activism, prostitution, sex industry, sexually transmitted diseases, women's health, Ye Haiyan
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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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