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

2. Going Down to the Sea

34 > 35 to go overseas.4 Such persons who actually live and work abroad and then return to China are known as “overseas Chinese.” People living in the two provinces with the largest numbers of overseas Chinese—Guangdong and Fujian—were especially eager to go abroad because they were impressed by the wealth of overseas Chinese who returned to China for the first time after having been away for many decades. As a result, in the early 1980s many people from Guangdong looked to be smuggled into Hong Kong, and people from Fujian, into Taiwan. After the Chinese authorities’ violent crackdown on the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the U.S. government responded by allowing many Chinese citizens in the United States to become permanent residents by granting them political asylum, regardless of whether they were students, visitors, or illegal immigrants.5 Coincidently, it was also a time when tens of thousands of people from certain rural areas around Fuzhou City (Fujian Province) began to clandestinely arrive in the United States with the help of professional human smugglers known as snakeheads.6 In June 1993, a human cargo ship by the name of Golden Venture arrived near New York City and unloaded more than 260 passengers. Ten Chinese citizens drowned while attempting to swim ashore.7 When the United States stepped up its efforts to stop Chinese citizens from entering the United States illegally, many potential migrants from China shifted their efforts toward Western Europe and other parts of the developed world. The early outward migration of Chinese citizens was dominated by male migrants. In the late 1990s, however, there was a dramatic increase in the number of Chinese women going overseas. The latter included both legal as well as illegal, and temporary as well as permanent migrants. For example, when Chinese citizens were smuggled into Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most were men who were brought to Taiwan to work in the manufacturing , construction, and fishing industries.8 But by the late 1990s male workers from China had begun to disappear from the Taiwan job market. They were replaced in part by Chinese women who were smuggled into Taiwan for work in the local sex sector.9 This feminization of the illegal immigration of mainland Chinese into Taiwan was dramatic and pervasive. In 1997 the British returned Hong Kong to China, and two years later the Portuguese handed Macau back to the Chinese. After the conversion of these former colonies into special administrative regions (SARs) with their own political and judicial systems, the Chinese authorities worked hard to improve their economies in order to win over the local populations. As a result, Hong Kong was promoted as the shopping center, and Macau the gambling mecca, for China’s 1.3 billion people. In order to encourage mainland Chinese 36 > 37 they left China (see Table 2.1). Four subjects (or 3%) said they realized they would work as prostitutes right after they arrived in the destination country, twenty-two not long after they had arrived, and seventeen long after they had settled down abroad. The last two categories of subjects—those who entered the sex sector either not long after or long after they had gone abroad—were predominantly women we interviewed in Los Angeles and New York. These women in the United States were quite different from the other women in Asia in terms of age (older), marital status (more likely to be married or divorced), education (better educated), region of origin (came from the northeast rather than from the south), and commercial sex experience (most were not prostitutes in China). Even though these women said they did not go to America with a plan to sell sex, we do not know how many of them knew back in China that, if they struggled in the United States, there was always a chance for them to enter prostitution as a last resort. If we exclude women in Los Angeles and New York from the calculation, then 105 out of the remaining 117 (90%) said they went overseas with the knowledge that they would be engaging in providing sexual services. This same point has been made by Johan Lindquist (a professor at Stockholm University) and Nicola Piper (a professor at the University of Wales) in their review of the research on prostitution in Southeast Asia: “What has become clear in...