The Moral Economy of Female Sex Workers in Post-Socialist China

In my paper, I show how women in the sex trade operate at once outside of the law and inside a traditional social system—if at its blurred edges. I look, specifically, at how social order is maintained in the sex trade through moral obligations and group norms (informal rules of actions), both of which set limits not addressed by state law. My research draws on my twenty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork in red-light districts in and around the capital city of Hainan (Haikou), areas that have become a magnet for internal migration in post-reform southern China. In looking at their daily struggles, in the context of post-socialist Chinese, it becomes apparent that the market has fully penetrated their lives.

Building on recent scholarship concerned with people engaged in illegal activities (e.g., Bourgois and Schonberg 2009) and classical literature on moral economy (e.g., Thomson 1971), I present a case study for understanding the moral and economic demands made upon female sex workers.

My work challenges cultural claims about Chinese sex workers’ ethics. Rather than being estranged from moral discourse, this community is richly embedded in the moral concerns of everyday life; the women enter the sex trade as a way to fulfill their moral obligation to support their families; the women attempt to, and are encouraged to, diligently participate in a moral economy with other women in the sex trade; and, when conformity with culturally gendered morality proves impracticable, the women learn and practice performances of verbal deceptions in order to preserve the appearance of conformity.  

What this research further reveals is that the norms of reciprocity vary depending on several factors. The moral economy of sharing among female sex workers is a requirement for mutual survival in their hostile environment. Even as female sex workers go about their daily lives amid conditions of scarcity and the considerable burden of providing for the needs of their families, they continue to help one another at the expense of their own needs or/and desires. Mutual help must therefore be a zero-sum calculation. Furthermore, the morally-bound social networks created through mutual obligations among network members facilitates material survival while working as insurance against starving and illness during difficult seasons. In this sense, moral economy operates as a social force addressing the defects of economic security.

This study also points to relative values for morality; among members of a network, a local morality supersedes other moralities critically valued in the larger society. The chosen morality is then prioritized, thus providing for the network members’ (and, to an extent, their families’) survival. Such community members’ local sense of morality is not bound by outsiders’ rationale or morality.

From the emic perspective, female sex workers themselves identify a failure to achieve mutual reciprocity as a failure to care for friendship with colleagues who live under shared, harsh circumstances. The women’s cultural logic demonstrates that substantial participation in the moral economy of sharing is inalienable from their emotions: friendship, affection, and understanding of peers’ difficult circumstances. In this sense, material goods alone are not a substitute for emotions, rather, material goods irrevocably connect with emotions and are the measure of certain emotional relationships. This logic is in line with a state sanctioned cultural logic, and in this way female sex workers show how the moral economy among themselves is a means of expressing renqing (i.e., human feelings and moral norms). In other words, renqing ethics – the culturally constructed norms of interpersonal relationship – provide guidance for female sex workers as they endeavor to interact with peers in a socially acceptable way.

Such reciprocity among female sex workers is the basis for sociality and thus establishes the boundaries of the professional networks that provide companionship. Sharing food, drinks, housing, and monetary gifts for birthdays and weddings are the disadvantaged women’s primary means of defining and measuring one another’s humanity, expressing caring friendships and excluding undesirable ones. The generous sharing of resources among network members brings a female sex worker a good reputation and authority over daily decision-making and controversial issues. At the same time, failing to participate in the moral economy by avoiding the reciprocal obligations marks a woman as “stingy” and “antisocial,” leading her to be ostracized from the network.