Selling Sex Overseas: Chinese Women and the Realities of Prostitution and Global Sex Trafficking

7. Supply and Demand: Follow the Money

170 > 171 basis for the conclusions that are generally reached about debt bondedness. We also have little data on specifically how much money these women are making overseas; but again the generally accepted conclusion is that they usually earn little or nothing, and that they often end up returning home empty-handed.2 In this chapter, we describe what we have learned about this issue from our interviews with 350 respondents who have knowledge with respect to Chinese women in this regard. In particular, we learn how much our respondents paid facilitators for the chance to go abroad, how much they charged their clients per sexual transaction, how many transactions they had on average , and how the money from the clients was distributed among the women and the various collaborators and employers. Harking back to the critically important role of economics as the dominant push factor in the transnational movement of women for commercial sex, we believe that these sort of data shed light on the economic aspects of the global sex trade, and thus help us better understand the force behind the massive movement of women across international borders. Sticking with the economics of commercial sex, but shifting to the demand side of the equation, we then look at those whose money is driving the whole commercial sex business, namely, its clientele. Most of the work on prostitution and sex trafficking has focused on the women who sell sex, and on the (typically) male traffickers who force women to engage in prostitution . A number of experts have, however, argued that the men who buy sex should not be overlooked in any examination of prostitution and sex trafficking .3 We did not conduct any formal interviews with buyers of sex in our research , but we did talk to a number of them informally. In addition, we asked our female subjects about their clients, and thereby learned a lot about the men who bought sex from them. In this chapter, we will examine who these clients are; we will look at client violence, which has been said to be a major concern for xiaojies; and at the nature of the relationships between buyers and sellers in the sex business. We want to make clear at the outset of our discussion of specific money issues that all the monetary calculations we will present are just that—calculations . They are rough estimates; but they are the best estimates possible given the nature of the information available. For example, nearly all the figures in American dollars have been converted from foreign currencies, and because of the fluctuations in exchange rates the U.S. dollar amounts we present had to be ballpark estimates.4 The conversion also accounts for why the amounts cited are often seemingly very specific, e.g., $106 or $67 or $221. Second, when we calculated the female subjects’ daily or monthly incomes, 172 > 173 different depending on the site. The three subjects in Hong Kong paid an average of only about $900, compared to almost $27,000 for the eight subjects in Los Angeles. Subjects in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia also did not pay a lot—roughly $1,000. For Taiwan, the average road fee was over $6,000, and it was one of the more expensive places to go among our research sites in Asia. Ah Qiang, the escort agency owner mentioned earlier, explained why this relatively large amount of money was needed to bring someone from China to Taiwan, using the fake marriage method: In the past, it took only forty-five days for the “bride” in China to come to Taiwan. At that time, the fake husband had to go to China only once [visit and marry]. Now, the fake husband needs to go to China three times: first, he goes to China as a member of a tour group for three days [this is the cheapest way to visit China], second, he goes to China to marry, and third, he goes to China to bring his “wife” back to Taiwan. Sometimes, both the agent and the fake husband’s parents also need to go to China to arrange things to make it more convincing to the Taiwanese authorities. So, it costs a lot of money. Once the “wife” comes, the agent pays the fake husband about $1,000 as the first monthly payment; pays her rent [the total amount of one month rent plus deposit...