Anyone who was in Shenzhen, the Chinese city not far from Hong Kong, on 29 November must have thought they were back in the days of the cultural Revolution when the Red Guards paraded “the enemies of the revolution” in the square, exposing them to the humiliation of public ridicule. The Shenzhen police brought back this old practice for a hundred prostitutes who, after being arrested, were paraded in the square as a negative moral example in front of a crowd of people who were more puzzled than outraged. With their wrists handcuffed and all dressed in yellow, the girls tried to cover their faces so as not to be recognised by friends and family, but the policemen wouldn’t let them.
 
20 million prostitutes. In Shenzhen, just as in all  other Chinese cities, the prostitution phenomenon is expanding as fast as the Chinese economy. At the lowest level, the prostitution market is frequented by hordes of young, single immigrants from the countryside who have invaded the cities in search of work, while at the higher levels it’s frequented by the new middle and rich classes with lots of money to spend and the high-levels of the Party hierarchy, who have always had a taste for this particularly type of luxury. Yang Fan, a Chinese economist, has calculated that there are at least 20 million prostitutes in the country, generating a income equal to 6% of the Chinese GDP.
Apart from the show put on by the police in Shenzhen, it seems that the prostitution phenomenon is largely tolerated by the Chinese authorities. The girls themselves almost all come from poor rural areas where unemployment is very high, working on the streets, in bars, in the massages parlours, saunas and in all categories of hotel, both private and state-run.
 
Slaves imported from Vietnam. The prostitution phenomenon hides some dramatic stories, particularly in the south of China where there is a flourishing trade in Vietnamese girls. The girls are persuaded to escape from their own country by organised gangs with the promise of a better life, but when they arrive in China they are sold as sex slaves to rich southern families for prices ranging from €300 to €2,000, depending on their age and beauty. They are then destined to work during the day and at night satisfy the sexual desires of all the men in the family, but they cannot go to the police because they are often locked up in the houses and they are illegal immigrants who would end up in prison. The luckiest ones become modern concubines, while some of them even end up marrying men who fall in love with them, but a lot of the others, particularly in the mining regions in Hebei province, don’t go to private houses but are sold to brothels frequented by miners.