Like countless other Beijing sex workers, ”Kelly” had viewed the Olympic rings as akin to dollar signs, expecting a big pay-day as the city shifts into party mode for Games.
But those dreams were all but extinguished thanks to a police offensive aimed at preventing the city’s rollicking sex industry from tarnishing the event, which begins on Friday.
”The police are suddenly much more formidable now. We have to be very careful,” the waif-like 23-year-old said, stirring a watered-down drink in a dim bar frequented by sex workers but notably empty on a recent Saturday night.
The crackdown has closed up many of the most notorious bars and other prostitution centres.
Kelly, who hails from nearby Hebei province and declined to give her Chinese name, said many of her fellow sex workers had recently been thrown in jail before being sent back to their home provinces.
”We have to be careful. If I get thrown out of Beijing, I won’t be able to get back in because police are putting up roadblocks into Beijing,” said Kelly, who formerly prowled hotel lobbies but was chased out by management.
The crackdown is part of a hurried makeover aimed at sweeping the city’s less savoury elements under the rug, at least until the Games end, and which has seen campaigns against drug offenders and even spitting and queue-jumping by the general public.
Tighter controls and more frequent checks on the visas of foreigners — apparently aimed at preventing security threats to the Games — have also cleared out the many sex workers from neighbouring Mongolia and Russia, Kelly said.
”We are closed for fire inspection. Come back after the Olympics,” said a man who answered the phone at Maggie’s, a bar in the city’s embassy district normally filled nightly with freelancing Mongolian hookers.
Its front door has been padlocked for about three months for a ”fire inspection”.
Basically stamped out during the puritanical Mao Zedong era, sex work flourishes in today’s more open China, with estimates of the country’s sex workers ranging as high as 10-million or more.
Sex workers ply their trade with virtual impunity in bars, massage spas, karaoke parlours and the ”barber shops” that are found in many Beijing back alleys and which have nothing to do with haircuts.
Male travellers typically receive phone calls shortly after checking into Chinese hotel rooms, asking whether they want a girl sent up.
Periodic anti-prostitution campaigns have been launched but nothing like the capital’s current operation, say observers.
”The city is in big clean-up mode,” said a posting last month on the website Internationalsexguide.info, which bills itself as ”the internet’s largest sex travel forum” and features graphic, member-submitted updates on where to buy sex.
”All the known [prostitution] spots are being targeted and raided constantly. Many have closed,” it said.
The raids seem to have targetted the more obvious prostitution centres, and it remains to be seen whether the Games will be sex-free.
Hotels, for example, typically offer discreet sexual services in the guise of in-room ”massages”.
But such crackdowns give rise to other problems, said Dr Bernhard Schwartlander, China country representative for the Joint United Nations on HIV/Aids.
”If you drive it underground everything gets much more out of control. The likelihood of promoting condom use is reduced or there may be violence against women, which makes them more vulnerable,” he said.
Not to worry, said Otka, a Mongolian prostitute whose thick, sparkling purple eye-shadow glittered brightly in a dark bar and who claimed rather improbably to be 28-years young.
”It has been a big trouble, but it won’t last long,” she said. – AFP
