Prostitution in Shanghai

chapter 22 Prostitution in Shanghai Sue Gronewold Introduction Shanghai and Prostitution This chapter traces the history of sex work in Shanghai over four centuries and views the history of prostitution in Shanghai as one part of the story of a changing city in a radically changing China. Of the countries included in this project, China is of particular interest since it represents a case in which prostitution was historically tolerated and regulated legally and socially by a highly centralized state1 which went through dramatic transformations in the twentieth century, with policies on prostitution shifting just as extremely. * In the footnotes, Chinese names are rendered in the western fashion with personal name first and family name last but in the text the traditional Chinese style is maintained. 1 There has been interest in and concern about prostitution throughout Chinese history, and it has long been a subject of literature, drama, and poetry as well as law, with wide-ranging sources, especially since the boom in printing in the late sixteenth century and subsequent rise of vernacular fiction that allowed for much more nuanced and full descriptions of gender models and sexual mores. Giovanni Vitiello, Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculin- ity in Late Imperial China (Chicago, 2011), pp. 4–5. Another category mined by social historians has been unofficial histories (yeshi) which were touted by late Qing reformers as the most useful way to educate the public “to save the nation with fiction.” Quoted in Madeleine Yue Dong, “Unofficial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Chinese Republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian”, in Beata Goodman and Wendy Larson (eds), Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial China (Lanham, 2005), pp. 169–188, 184f1. For Shanghai, good sources exist from the Qing Dynasty, including literary works and official gazetteers, imperial reign histories, law codes, and court documents. See the discus- sion in Linda C. Johnson, Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port 1074–1857 (Stanford, 1995), pp. 17–18, 403. For the period covered in this chapter, the increasing variety of sources include administration and police records about social control as well as medical records tracking health concerns, with perhaps the most useful popular guidebooks and travellers’ accounts, both Chinese and foreign. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century China (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 14–17; Christian Henriot, Prostitu- tion and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History 1849–1949 (trans. Noel Castelino) (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 69–70. By the nineteenth century, sensational stories about prostitutes appeared frequently in popular newspapers and modern periodicals like Shenbao that boomed during © Sue Gronewold, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_023 Sue Gronewold - 9789004346253 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-NDDownloaded 4.0 fromlicense. Brill.com09/25/2021 04:59:57PM via free access 568 Gronewold Early in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), the system of court-run brothels was gradually abolished (along with the status of “outcast” for prostitutes), and prostitution was exclusively a commercial private enterprise, although regulated by law and controlled by social custom.2 Public policy changed dramati- cally in the course of the twentieth century, with early calls for abolition in Republican China (1911–1949) culminating in its presumable total prohibition under the communist government in 1949. Since 1978, in the aftermath of the most radical phase of the Maoist revolution, prostitution has re-emerged with a vengeance in a liberalizing China (although still legally prohibited), and its relationship with the state continues to be complicated. this period plus literary sources that include novels, modern plays, cabaret, and film. There is much recent work on prostitution (and sex in general) by sociologists, anthropologists, and students of law and criminal justice. Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge, 2011); Ruan Fangfu, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture (New York, 1991); Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gen- der since 1949 (New York, 1997); Min Liu, Migration, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking: the Voice of Chinese Women (New Brunswick, 2011); and Tiantian Zheng, Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Post-Socialist China (Minneapolis, 2009). Prostitution and sexuality are also increasingly popular topics for social historians, many of whom maintain feminist approach- es to sex work. See Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures; Evans, Women and Sexuality; Elaine Jeffreys (ed.), Sex and Sexuality in China (London, 2006). Yet historians of women and sexuality still decry the lack of attention in the official record given to prostitution and have to ferret out data from disparate sources; see Ruan, Sex in China; Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality. Although it has long been standard in China to explain prostitution on economic grounds, relatively few studies of prostitution regard it primarily as a labour issue, including those looking at labour migration. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 388–392, identifies sexolo- gist Pan Suiming as the closest to offering a labour-market analysis. Lastly, the lack of writing and research on prostitution reflects the voice of the prostitute herself—and occasionally himself. Travis S.K. Kong, Chinese Male Sexualities: Memba, Tongzhi, and Golden Boy (New York, 2010); Kam Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinities: Society and Gender in China (Cam- bridge, 2002), although there is a long tradition of writers conveying the voice of the girl gone astray. Today, with more openness both in public and in academia, a growing number of anthropologists, sociologists, sexologists, and photographers are transcribing the stories and documenting the lives of sex workers up close. Zheng, Red Lights; Liu, Migration; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, pp. 3–4. 2 At its height during the Tang and Sung Dynasties, government-run brothels included both those under local officials and the imperial government. Prostitutes were included in China’s hereditary outcast system along with other rootless people such as actors, barbers, transport workers, and exiled prisoners. Early Qing emperors ended the government-run brothel system and formally abolished hereditary categories, putting in place greater systems of control for the entire population. See Shunu Wang, Zhongguo Changji Shi [A History of Prostitution in China] (Beijing, 1934). Sue Gronewold - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 04:59:57PM via free access <UN> Prostitution in Shanghai 569 Much of what follows could be said for many cities in China, particularly on the eastern seaboard, but there are a few significant differences. One as- pect of Shanghai that distinguished it from cities like Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing in central China and Beijing in the north is that it was always more of a commercial than an administrative centre. In Chinese terms, this meant the predominance of merchants, markets, and guildhalls thriving among the jumble of docks, warehouses, and shipyards in the surrounding suburbs and dominating the temples and gardens in the city centre.3 As for the entertainment districts in the city centre, entertainers for the most part catered more to merchants than to scholar/official elites as in many other cities in the region. And as an important commercial centre perfectly located at the confluence of river access to the interior and northern and southern coastal routes, Shanghai always attracted men looking for sexual services—as well as women in the city and environs trying to make a livelihood by providing them—but it did not of- fer the fine courtesan culture of Hangzhou or Suzhou. And its trajectory across the modern era was also distinct; Shanghai today, like treaty-port Shanghai, still attracts a disproportionate amount of businessmen, merchants, and en- trepreneurial outsiders. Five Distinct Eras For the period from 1600 to the present, I have identified five distinct eras of prostitution. The last dynasty, the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which was estab- lished in 1644, is the start date, and the first phase covers nearly two centuries of rule by energetic emperors, when the entertainment culture of the previ- ous high Ming became more regulated. The second phase, from 1830 to 1911, covers the period when Shanghai was designated a treaty port by the British after the Opium War (from 1843). During that era, Shanghai’s treaty port devel- opment, combined with an influx of economic and political refugees fleeing political uprisings and extreme economic impoverishment, largely reshaped its population, politics, and power balances. During the third period of Repub- lican China (1912–1949), after the fall of the last imperial dynasty, Shanghai was overrun with drugs, prostitutes, gangs, and gambling. Although it was not the political capital (nearby Nanjing had that distinction), it became in this period a cultural capital strongly identified with the Chinese Enlightenment of May 4 1919. Near the end of this period, from 1937 to 1945, Shanghai experienced life as a “lonely island” under Japanese control, with the end of the war bringing civil war and Communist victory, although practically without bloodshed in Shanghai. Next, under Mao and the consolidation of the socialist revolution 3 Johnson, Shanghai,

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