With Glut of Lonely Men, China Has an Approved Outlet for Unrequited Lust

 

By DAN LEVIN

GUANGZHOU, China — Slack-jawed and perspiring, Chen Weizhou gazed at a pair of life-size female dolls clad, just barely, in lingerie and lace stockings.
Above these silicone vixens, an instructional video graphically depicted just how realistic they felt once undressed.
A 46-year-old tour bus driver, Mr. Chen had come earlier this month to the Guangzhou National Sex Culture Festival “for fun,” which was not how he described intimacy with his wife, who did not attend.
“When you’re young sex is so mysterious, but once you’re married it gets really bland,” he said, barely taking his eyes off the screen.
With an official theme of “healthy sex, happy families,” the 11th annual exposition sought to remedy the plight of Chinese men like Mr. Chen — and their wives, if they are married.

A Place Where Capitalism and Hedonism Meet: Three decades after China began shedding its prudish Mao-era mores, sex is now a big business there.

Shenzhen jack-off competition
Nov. 8th 2013, the 11th China Sex Culture Festival and 15th Guangzhou Sex and health exhibition's opening ceremony is hold in Pazhou Nanfeng International Exhibition Center in Guangzhou China.
The overwhelming presence of men at the festival mirrored a demographic imbalance in China, where decades of the one-child rule and a cultural preference for sons combined with illegal sex-selective abortions have distorted the country’s gender ratio to 118 newborn boys for every 100 girls in 2012, rather than the normal 103 boys.
In Guangdong Province, home to a migrant worker population of 30 million — China’s largest — the scarcity of women leaves bachelors with limited options.
Filling an exhibition center here in the capital of Guangdong in southern China, the festival was a three-day mating ritual between capitalism and hedonism, all diligently observed by that most prudish of chaperones: the Chinese government.
Erotic possibilities abounded, including a transgender fashion show, sliced deer antler marketed as an aphrodisiac, naughty nurse costumes and some flesh-color objects disconcertingly called “Captain Stabbing.”
Three decades after China began shedding its priggish Mao-era mores, sex is now a big business here. Across the country, pink-lit “hair salons” staffed by provocatively garbed women compete with massage parlors and late-night paid companions who slip their business cards under hotel room doors.
Those looking to enhance their encounters can shop at countless “adult health product” stores and on the Internet.
Most of the inventory is made in China.
According to state news media, more than 1,000 Chinese companies manufacture around 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, generating $2 billion a year as of 2010.
The bounty of carnal titillation must contend with the firm hand of the Communist Party, which bans pornography and punishes those guilty of “group licentiousness” in the name of protecting traditional Chinese values.
But the party’s moral authority has frayed of late because of the publicized antics of its friskier members.
In June, a government official was sentenced to 13 years in prison for corruption after a video surfaced showing him in bed with an 18-year-old woman.
His fall came three months after photos depicting a coterie of six naked people, including a party official and his wife, exploded on the Internet.
In an attempt to give the sex festival a veneer of respectability, government-run medical organizations sponsored booths in a side room, which were, unsurprisingly, desolate.
The main draw was lust.
Thousands of visitors, nearly all middle-aged men wielding cameras, poured through the aisles in search of any visible flesh.
“Guys have been taking my picture all day,” said a bikini-clad model, Liang Lin, 23, who was hugging her bare midriff defensively as a throng of men jostled desperately to get a better shot.
Not far away, a male crowd waited for a diminutive Japanese pornography star named Rei Mizuna to appear.
When she finally emerged from a dressing room to hand out racy autographed photos, her frenzied fans surged forward with such zeal they shattered a glass display case.
Those unrequited desires have helped spawn a booming domestic sex toy industry.
“A stuffed man doesn’t know what it’s like to be hungry,” explained a salesman at one booth filled with inflatable dolls.
Just then, an older gentleman approached and tried to bargain over an $8 figure with black tresses and a vacant stare.
Across the floor, the Chinese chain Buccone sold higher-end companionship.
These $6,400 rubber dolls warm up “just like a real person,” said an employee, Nie Tai, 23, and could be customized.
“Some men come with photos of their late wives.”
Huang Yulong, who works for a lingerie company called Toylace, was unfazed by the festival’s libidinous fervor.
“Chinese men have a fetish for tearing off a woman’s clothes, so they’re not looking for romance,” said Ms. Huang, standing beside a mannequin wearing a fishnet body stocking that seemed to have run out of thread around the inner thigh.
At least, not with their spouses, she added.
“Customers say they’re buying for their wives, but we know it’s for their mistresses.”
In a country where it is still taboo to discuss sex publicly, creative packaging hinted at a multitude of personal tastes and private anxieties.
Among the condom brands were Freud, packed in pink boxes, and Tiger Teeth, which lay beside a colorful assortment of prophylactics wrapped to resemble lollipops.
Perhaps because the domestic sex toy industry started with a focus on exports, many items boasted of a foreign mystique, like the hand-held Great Rome 5 and King Kong.
English mistranslations were particularly problematic among male sexual enhancement products, many of which suggested unintended consequences, like Black Widow.
One vendor failed to impress a potential customer when he vowed that the Casanova pills worked best. “The effects last a week,” he said.
To attract potential buyers, some companies got creative, hosting pole dancing shows and other activities.
Li Jianglin, 42, a shoe factory manager, won a contest in which participants raced to inflate condoms, huffing and puffing until the first one popped.
“Go, go, go!” screamed the female organizer.
Mr. Li won a cash prize worth 16 cents, strawberry-flavored condoms and a pink, battery-operated device with “overwhelm by joy” emblazoned on the box.
He eyed the contraption, turning it this way and that.
“The condoms are useful, but I don’t know what this thing is,” he said. “Really.”
Not all visitors appeared to be so clueless.
Ignoring the festival crowds, a 66-year-old retired real-estate consultant fondled an anatomically correct gadget, which her husband promptly purchased for $8.
“When men get older, that part doesn’t function very well and I have needs,” said the woman, who would identify herself only as Ms. Huang.
She marveled at how times had changed since they married in 1975.
“Back then, under Mao, you couldn’t talk about sex,” she said.
Asked how they learned, Ms. Huang smiled knowingly.
“Instinct,” she said.

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An Old Chinese Novel Is Racy Reading Still

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Mr. Roy

When David Tod Roy entered a used-book shop in the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1950, he was a 16-year-old American missionary kid looking for a dirty book.
His quarry was an unexpurgated copy of “The Plum in the Golden Vase” (金瓶梅 Jīn Píng Méi) an infamously pornographic tale of the rise and fall of a corrupt merchant, written by an anonymous author in the late 16th century.

A 17th-century illustration for the Ming dynasty novel "The Plum in the Golden Vase," newly translated, in five volumes with more than 4,400 endnotes, by David Tod Roy.

Mr. Roy had previously encountered only an incomplete English translation, which switched decorously into Latin when things got too raunchy. 

But there it was — an old Chinese edition of the whole thing — amid other morally and politically suspect items discarded by nervous owners after Mao Zedong’s takeover the previous year.
“As a teenage boy, I was excited by the prospect of reading something pornographic,” Mr. Roy, now 80 and an emeritus professor of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago, recalled recently by telephone. “But I found it fascinating in other ways as well.”
So have readers who have followed Mr. Roy’s nearly 40-year effort to bring the complete text into English, which has just reached its conclusion with the publication by Princeton University Press of the fifth and final volume, “The Dissolution.”
The novelist Stephen Marche, writing last month in The Los Angeles Review of Books, praised Mr. Roy’s masterly rendering of a richly encyclopedic novel of Ming dynasty manners, which Mr. Marche summed up, Hollywood-pitch style, as “Jane Austen meets hard-core pornography.” 

And Mr. Roy’s scholarly colleagues are no less awe-struck at his erudition, which seemingly leaves no literary allusion or cultural detail unannotated.
“He is someone who believes it’s his obligation to know absolutely everything about this book, even things that are only mentioned passingly,” said Wei Shang, a professor of Chinese literature at Columbia University. 

“It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to complete this kind of project.”
It also may take a certain stubbornness on the part of ordinary readers to make it all the way through this five-volume work, given its Proustian length (nearly 3,000 pages), DeMille-worthy cast (more than 800 named characters) and “Ulysses”-like level of quotidian detail — to say nothing of Mr. Roy’s 4,400-plus endnotes, whose range and precision would give one of Nabokov’s obsessive fictional scholars a run for his money.
They touch on subjects ranging from the novel’s often obscure literary references and suggested further reading on “the use of impatiens blossoms and garlic juice to dye women’s fingernails” to obscure Ming-era slang whose meaning, Mr. Roy notes with pride, had long eluded even native Chinese-speaking scholars.
“It’s not just a translation, it’s also a reference book,” said Yihong Zhang, a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh who is translating some of Mr. Roy’s notes into Chinese as part of his doctoral dissertation at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

“It opens a window onto Chinese literature and culture.”
And then there is the sex, which has fed fascination with the book, even though few people could actually read it.

In Mao’s China, access to the unexpurgated edition was restricted to government high officials (who were urged to study its depiction of imperial corruption) and select academics. 

Today, complete versions remain hard to find in China, though it is easily downloadable on Chinese Internet sites.
The level of raunch remains startling even to some Western literary scholars — particularly the infamous Chapter 27, in which the merchant, named Ximen Qing, puts his most depraved concubine to particularly prolonged and imaginative use.
“When I taught it, my students were flabbergasted, even though they knew about the novel’s reputation,” said Patricia Sieber, a professor of Chinese literature at Ohio State University. 

“S-and-M, the use of unusual objects as sex toys, excessive use of aphrodisiacs, sex under all kinds of nefarious circumstances — you name it, it’s all there.”
The novel’s sex has also inspired some modern reconsiderations. 

Amy Tan’s new novel, “The Valley of Amazement,” features a scene in which an aging courtesan in early-20th-century Shanghai is asked to re-enact a particularly degrading sex scene from this classic.
“I can’t say any of the characters are likable,” Ms. Tan said of the older novel. 

“But it’s a literary masterpiece.”
But the “Chin P’ing Mei,” as the novel is known in Chinese, is about far more than just sex, scholars hasten to add. 

It was the first long Chinese narrative to focus not on mythical heroes or military adventures, but on ordinary people and everyday life, chronicled down to the minutest details of food, clothing, household customs, medicine, games and funeral rites, with exact prices given for just about everything, including the favor of bribe-hungry officials up and down the hierarchy.
“It’s an extraordinarily detailed description of a morally derelict and corrupt society,” Mr. Roy said.
Mr. Roy dates the beginning of his work on the translation to the 1970s. 

By then, a revision of Clement Egerton’s 1939 English translation had put the Latinized dirty bits into English. 

But that edition still omitted the many quotations from earlier Chinese poetry and prose, along with, Mr. Roy said, much of the authentic flavor.
So he began copying every line borrowed from earlier Chinese literature onto notecards, which eventually numbered in the thousands, and reading every literary work known to have circulated in the late 16th century, to identify the allusions.
The first volume appeared in 1993 to rave reviews; the next came a long eight years later. 

Some colleagues urged him to go faster and scale back the notes. 

At one point, a Chinese website even reported that he had died amid his labors.
Just as Mr. Roy was completing the final volume, he received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which ruled out any prospect of preparing a condensed edition, as his Chicago colleague Anthony Yu did with his acclaimed translation of “Journey to the West,” another marathon-length Ming classic.
“I miss having something to concentrate on,” Mr. Roy said. 

“But unfortunately, I’m suffering from virtually constant fatigue.”
Scholars credit Mr. Roy (whose brother, J. Stapleton Roy, was United States ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995) with rescuing “The Plum in the Golden Vase” from its reputation in the West as merely exotic pornography and opening the door to a more political reading of the book.
It’s one that already comes easily to commentators in China, where the novel is seen as holding up a mirror to the tales of political and social corruption that fill newspapers now.
“You can find people like Ximen Qing easily today,” said Mr. Zhang in Pittsburgh. 

“Not just in China, but everywhere.”

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Chinese e-commerce site draws anger for global sales of child-size sex doll

By Steven Millward

A Chinese e-commerce site that helps Chinese manufacturers sell goods globally is getting into big trouble for one very creepy product being sold on its site. 

It has been spotted that DHgate has one Chinese merchant who’s selling disturbingly life-like child-size, sex dolls. 

As you can see in the product page images below, the doll’s figure is far from fully-formed and the shape suggests that of a nine or ten year old girl:
This was spotted by an advocacy group on Facebook called Dining for Dignity. 

It quickly set up a protest page to pressure DHgate – one of China’s top global merchants platforms – into removing the item or banning the seller. 

Its petition reads, ” This negligence is fueling human sex trafficking, pedophilia, violent rape, and more.” 

The under-fire merchant is named allenchow89, whose other products include normal, adult-shaped sex dolls.
Described as a “beautiful young girl sex doll for men,” the item costs $178 and is available to ship worldwide. 

57 of them have been sold so far to customers in the US, UK, Japan, Germany, and more. 

The product listing boasts that it is highly flexible, and that all three holes can be used.
We’ve contacted DHgate HQ in Beijing and will update if we get a response.
Child-like sex dolls are illegal in some nations, depending on how they’re used or presented. 

A search of DHgate – as well as rival Chinese site Alibaba – reveals no other merchants selling dolls that are quite so child-like, despite some listings being explicit in touting “child” or “young” in the product listings.

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That Time a Buddhist Nun Walked into Beijing's Futuristic Sex Shop

The market for Chinese adult toys is coming out of the shadows.
BY SUE-LIN WONG

Instead of the faded red-and-white lettering often found atop Chinese "adult" stores, Powerful Sex Shop's logo features the playful image of a single sperm wriggling up into a sun. 

Instead of dusty packs of condoms cramped into a tiny store, gigantic, bright pink lips hang suspended above a phallus-shaped, bright yellow coffee table, with different sized silicon breasts hanging on a wall. High-end vibrators that could be mistaken for Easter eggs lie in plush, velvet display cushions. 

Plastic cucumbers and bananas are splayed next to S&M chains, whips, and blindfolds imported from countries like Japan, Germany, and Sweden that are known for the high quality (and price) of their sex toys.
It's all part of a bet by Ma Jiajia and Ma Wei that they can make money by making sex less grim. 

The two unrelated college friends founded Powerful after graduating from university in 2012. 

Located in the up-market Sanlitun district of Beijing, the store is different from most of the sterile, hole-in-the wall sex shops found across Chinese cities and towns. 

In a country where talking sex can still be taboo -- one Chinese academic estimates sex education there is "at least 60 years behind" developed countries -- Powerful Sex Shop's co-founders are trying to make sex lively, bright, and fun.
So far, Ma Jiajia and Ma Wei's efforts seem to be paying off: "Profits are high and we are selling over $1,600 worth of goods each day," Ma Wei told FP; the Sanlitun branch is their third. 

His co-founder Ma Jiajia says the clientele is diverse: "We have all types of people who come into our stores... office workers, migrant workers, university students, actors, celebrities, entrepreneurs." 

One time, a Buddhist nun came in, apparently by mistake, Ma said -- then stuck around to have a peek at the merchandise.
It's a deliberately far cry from the dark, clinical sex shops still lurking on the most unexpected of street corners in China. 

On the west side of Beijing lies Adam and Eve, reportedly the first legal sex shop opened in China since the Communists took power in 1949. 

Considered a daring novelty in 1993 when it first opened, the store is now desolate but for some drab sex toys and two sales assistants. 

One a recent visit, one of the assistants was napping, slumped over the cash register in a bare room that resembled a hospital ward. 

Fluorescent light hit the cracked, plastic floor, and dust-covered toys sat in locked, glass cabinets. 

"We don't really have any customers anymore," said the other assistant, dressed in a medical lab coat, who gave her name as Mrs. Li. 

"I think it's because there are too many other stores, too many other choices now."
There's no question that Powerful Sex Shop is operating in a burgeoning market. 

Definitive figures for the size of China's market for sex toys are hard to come by -- a 2012 article in Chinese business magazine The Founder put it at $16 billion -- but it's certainly on the upswing, with the Chinese version of men's magazine GQ estimating the market's annual growth at 63.9 percent. 

That's the demand side; supply should never be an issue, as China manufactures 70 percent of the world's sex toys.
This effort to bring sex into the sunlight still retains Chinese characteristics. 

Next to the shop entrance sits a box of books, with the intriguingly titled Confucius and Sex sitting on top. The place feels a bit like a coffee shop, but with dildos instead of espressos. 

Ma Jiajia said Powerful wasn't the type of place where a porn star would show up half-naked to "crack a whip." 

Instead, it was the type of place where consumers might see an "S&M Snow White" or a "Hello Kitty with big boobs."
Powerful does not sell online -- the founders plan to try starting by year's end -- but it is still powered, in part, by the Internet. 

Ma Jiajia uses Chinese social media like WeChat, a private messaging service with about 500 million users worldwide, to engage customers and the curious. 

Both owners' WeChat accounts are filled with photos of new products, musings on memorable customers, and, every so often, the obligatory selfie. 

In one of his photos on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, Ma Wei can be seen extending an irreverent middle finger at the camera.
To be sure, making a living in China's sex toy industry isn't all roses. 

One Beijing sex shop manager tearfully recounted how she was rounded up and detained for one month in a recent police crackdown on sex stores that sell medicine without the appropriate permits. 

Jason Ong, co-founder of Playroom, an online sexual health and wellness store based in Shanghai, said he had faced "sensitivities" when advertising his business in magazines.
But as China changes, so do its consumer and sex cultures. 

When the two meet -- with sexual fantasies wrapped in hip, Technicolor packaging -- the result can be hard to resist. 

Chinese citizens looking for that perfect, phallus-shaped coffee table finally have a place to go.

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Chinese Women Defend 'The Vagina Monologues'

And the response has been less than enlightened.
BY RACHEL LU

When 17 female students at the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU), one of China's most prestigious colleges, posted photographs of themselves holding up messages like "My Vagina Says: I Want Freedom," they probably didn't expect to cause such a stir on Chinese social media. 

The women posted the photos on Nov. 7 on Renren, an online community website popular with university students, to promote an upcoming campus performance of The Vagina Monologues, U.S. playwright Eve Ensler's controversial 1996 play. 

Each woman was photographed holding up a whiteboard with messages such as, "My Vagina Says: Don't Treat Me as a Sensitive Word," "My Vagina Says: 'I Can Be Sexy, But You Can't Harass Me,'" and "My Vagina Says: Someone Can Enter If I Say So." 

The photos quickly found their way to many other social media websites, including Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, and generated thousands of comments -- most evincing an ugly strain of misogyny.
Many male Internet users made comments passing judgment on the women's looks and supposedly loose sexual mores. 

A significant number of commentators compared the students to prostitutes. 

One Weibo user commented, "If no one told me they are from BFSU, I would think they are whores." Another commented, "What are we teaching in our schools? Are they the future of our country? They are a bunch of sluts. I feel so much pain for how far the Chinese civilization has fallen."
Over the past three decades, China's reforms have transformed the country's economic and social landscape, with women's sexuality increasingly advertised, commoditized, and monetized in the process. Prostitution is rampant and pictures of scantily-clad girls saturate China's Internet. 

While a minority spoke up in support of the girls, the photos still offended a surprisingly large number of Chinese Internet users, who viewed the students' open discussion of sex as another sign China's traditional values were going by the wayside.
The commoditization of sex seems to have cultivated the widely held view that relationships between men and women, including marriage, are an implicit exchange of sex for money. 

One online commenter on the photos complained, "The reality is that some women can't control their lower halves and open up their legs. But when it comes time to find a husband, they ask the guy to have a car and an apartment and also provide for the family."
Given strident online reaction, one could be forgiven for thinking China had never encountered The Vagina Monologues before. 

In fact, despite a brief ban on public performances of The Vagina Monologues in Beijing and Shanghai in 2004, the play was publicly staged from 2009 to 2011 in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen to sold-out audiences, although producers sometimes had to omit the word "vagina" from the title in publicity campaigns.
The disconnect between the elite, educated women at BFSU who take a feminist view of their sexuality and the Chinese public that insists on objectifying it is real and troubling. 

Then again, performances of The Vagina Monologues around the world have often provoked uncomfortable conversations -- and this incident may be an opportunity for the Chinese society to tackle issues of feminism, sex, and violence against women in an increasingly patriarchal society.

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Kept women

Mistresses are big business in China, where no official is a real man without his own ernai. What’s in it for the girls?
by James Palmer

A district in Shenzhen has become known as 'Second Wife Village' for the number of mistresses living there. 

Shanshan’s $550 shoes came from her lover, but the soles of her feet, as hard as leather, came from her childhood. 

‘We used to play barefoot in the village,’ she told me. 

‘All the girls in the karaoke bar had feet like this.’
At 26, Shanshan has come a long way from rural Sichuan, one of China’s poorer southern provinces, famous for the ‘spiciness’ of its food and its women. 

Today her lover, Mr Wu, keeps her in a Beijing apartment that ‘cost 2.5 million yuan ($410,000)’, and visits whenever he can find the time away from his wife. 

In his late 40s, and an official with a massive state-run oil company, he was recently in Africa for six months developing an oilfield. 

Shanshan got bored and decided to improve her scant English by finding a ‘language-exchange partner’ online, which is how she and I became friends this spring.
Shanshan never referred to Wu as her boyfriend; he was her ‘man’, her ‘lover’, and occasionally her ‘uncle’. When she said ‘boyfriend’, she meant the man her own age back in Sichuan with whom she spent much of her free day exchanging text messages and whom she saw twice a year.
She’d walked the common path for country girls becoming mistresses, or ernai (literally, ‘second woman’). She’d gone to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, at 17, where she’d worked as a hostess at a karaoke bar at a hotel, before moving to Beijing to do the same. 

Her work involved entertaining men, including, if they paid enough, sleeping with them; that was how she’d met her lover, who’d offered to set her up after their fourth ‘date’.
It was an understandable decision on his part: Shanshan was sexy, merry, and smart. 

And for her, it was an obvious choice. 

An enormous amount of off-book money sloshes around Chinese business and officialdom, and some of it runs into handbags. 

As well as paying for her apartment and buying her gifts, Shanshan’s ‘uncle’ provided her with a living allowance of ‘about 20,000 yuan ($3,260) a month’. 

This was about the average for Beijing; in smaller towns, 10,000 yuan might be acceptable, or even 5,000. At the top end, a mistress might receive 10,000 yuan in spending money every day.
She was adamant that I never visit her apartment because she was surrounded by other ernai. 

Local estate agents target provincial officials and businessmen looking to put their money into Beijing’s property bubble, and the men fill up the apartments, bought as investments, with their women. 

‘Half of the apartments are empty,’ she explained. 

‘And the other half are full of girls. Everyone gossips. About money, about men. If they saw me with a foreigner, they’d talk about it for a month.’
Keeping a woman is common among powerful Chinese men. 

A study by the Crisis Management Centre at Renmin University in Beijing, published this January, showed that 95 per cent of officials had illicit affairs, usually paid for, and 60 per cent of them had kept a mistress.
Until recent crackdowns forced greater discretion, Chinese official life had two social circles. 

As the mobster Henry Hill puts it in the film Goodfellas (a key reference point for Chinese provincial officialdom): ‘Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for the girlfriends.’
At dinner with Shanshan, Xiaoxue and Lingling — two of Shanshan’s slightly older friends from Sichuan — they all agreed that the social circuit had disappeared of late, and that it had come largely as a relief. 

‘It used to be a big part of work,’ said Xiaoxue, who was kept by a businessman back in Sichuan. 

‘You had to make yourself look really pretty, and you had to make up to the most important people there, but not so much that the woman they came with would get jealous. But you still had to be…’ she started to flutter her eyelashes and raised her voice an octave: ‘Oh, you’re so clever! Oh, what important work you do! Oh, you’re really 55? You look so strong!’
‘That was how I came to Beijing,’ Lingling added. 

‘I was with an official in Neijiang [in Sichuan], and they were hosting an inspection visit. One of the officials who was visiting really liked me, and he asked the guy I was with then to lend me to him, in exchange for connections. So I slept with him while he was in Neijiang, and then he brought me up to Beijing. But it didn’t work out between us.’
‘If you’re an official, you have to have a mistress, or at least a girlfriend,’ Xiaoxue said, ‘otherwise you’re not a real man. I used to have this friend who was a fake mistress. She was best friends with a gay guy — not a “duck” [male prostitute], just a normal gay guy — who was an official’s boyfriend. So the official would pay her to come out with him and pretend to be his mistress.’
Most mistresses are rural women who come to the job through other sex work, picked up at the karaoke bars, massage parlours and nightclubs that are often an obligatory part of business socialising. 

Their work is about emotions as much as sex. 

As with western punters who seek the ‘girlfriend experience’ online, Chinese men want the illusion of intimacy. 

‘You have to be the girlfriend he wanted when he was 20,’ said Xiaoxue. 

‘He wants to believe that you would be with him even if he wasn’t paying.’
She distinguished being a mistress from short-term hostessing, where you had to be a perfect servant, always putting the man’s needs first. 

‘If you’re too nice to him all the time, he’ll know it isn’t true,’ Xiaoxue said. 

‘If he looks at another woman, you should be jealous and sulk all evening until he apologises, so he knows you care.’

As the saying goes: ‘Old oxen chew young grass’
Zheng Tiantian, a social anthropologist at the State University of New York, worked as a karaoke bar hostess for two years in Dalian to research her PhD. 

‘The most powerful men were identified as those who could emotionally and physically control the hostesses, exploit them freely, and then abandon them,’ she writes in her astonishing book on the experience, Red Lights (2009). 

But the women are equally mercenary. 

One of her informants comments: ‘I’d rather be a mistress than a wife, because you can make much more as a mistress.’
At the same time, both sides desperately seek real feeling, even as they try to conceal it from their contemporaries. 

In Red Lights, Zheng depicts men who value ‘real friendship’ and ‘sincerity’ in the women they pay for, and women who ‘inflict scars on their hands and wrists’ in order to ‘remind themselves of the ruthless game they are engaged in’.
Shanshan, who normally held her ‘uncle’ in affectionate contempt, became worried about his stay in Africa. ‘Six months is a long time,’ she said. 

‘Do you think he’ll sleep with a black girl? I don’t think so; black girls all have AIDS. He wouldn’t cheat on me. Would he?’
The pragmatic approach of rural women leaves them better off than the educated urban girls who can also end up as mistresses. 

These urban women usually meet older men through regular work, and the relationship begins through genuine attraction. 

As they’ve maintained their ‘purity’ through not being involved in other sex work, they have a higher market value than the rural girls, and they’re more socially acceptable at high-end occasions.
A further distinction is sometimes made between ernai, who ‘know their place’, and xiaosan, ‘little threes’ (as in ‘third party’), who try to insinuate themselves between a lover and his wife with the aim of forcing divorce and remarriage. 

In practice, the terms are used interchangeably, but the difference matters especially to urban girls seeking to distinguish themselves from their rural counterparts.
‘Most xiaosan have a steady job and a higher educational background than an ernai. Xiaosan expect to marry the man because they’ve invested so much: their youth and their love,’ explains the 22-year-old founder of a website for xiaosan in Richard Burger’s Behind the Red Door: Sex in China (2012).
In my experience, many of the women expect never to marry their lover. 

One urban woman, Yu, told me: ‘I have money. My family is rich enough. I even have an apartment of my own. I just wanted to be his mistress so that he wouldn’t have other girlfriends. Apart from his wife.’
For Wen, now in her early 40s, with permed hair and lacquered nails, the limits had once been equally clear. As a young office worker in Beijing, she dated a north-eastern property developer worth tens of millions of dollars. 

‘I knew he had to have a wife,’ she said. 

‘I’m not stupid. But I thought I was his ernai, and that he loved me. Then I found that he kept three others around the city. I was his “fifth woman”, not the second.’

While a rural mistress might think first of her bank balance, an affair that starts emotionally (of which there has been an explosion) can have dramatic consequences. 

‘I never imagined that the one I loved so much, the one who lived four years with me, would become my enemy,’ Ji Yingnan, 26, told The Independent newspaper in July this year after exposing her lover Fan Yue’s corruption. 

Fan was the deputy director of the State Archives, a position he leveraged to fund a lifestyle of extravagant spending and foreign trips with Ji.
When they met, Fan was middle-aged, and Ji was 22. 

As the saying goes: ‘Old oxen chew young grass.’ 

In all such relationships, the age gap is a depressing constant. 

In high-end restaurants, I like to play ‘Mistress or daughter?’ while looking at the seated couples. 

Even the waxen former president Hu Jintao was once rumoured to have ‘a mistress younger than his daughter’.
What’s more, some young Chinese women infantilise themselves, often with the aid of plastic surgery, to imitate the big-eyed heroines of Japanese cartoons. 

The aesthetic is popular with older men, who are aroused not just by the fragile look, but by affected sa jiao, ‘cute whining’, done in the fashion of a demanding child. 

In their private pictures, the girls look all of 14, while the men play alongside them in childish games or make faces at the camera.
I suspect that the image of innocence reinforces the men’s belief in their mistress’s sincerity, and allows them to believe that they’re not exploiting the woman, but offering protection. 

The urban women I talked to believed this far more than their rural counterparts. 

For many of them, the comforting image of a protective father/lover figure prevailed. 

‘I thought I would always be safe with him,’ said one woman. 

‘I liked him so much I even arranged a threesome for his birthday. And I paid the other girl!’
Chinese men’s penchant for mistresses is sometimes attributed to deep-seated cultural expectations, and it’s true that Chinese culture has rarely paid even lip service to ideas of male fidelity. 

Yet modern reformers often singled out concubinage as a sign of China’s backwardness, and pressed for stronger roles for women. 

Some, such as modern China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen, or its first chairman, Mao Tse-tung, did so even as they pressed teenage girls into their beds. 

Modern mistress-keeping might seem like a step back to the distant past. 

But this is just an excuse: any society as dominated by male leaders, and with as vast a chasm between the elite and the poor, sees the same exploitation of young women by powerful men.
Besides, Shanshan and her friends seem less like victims and more like players, aware of the limits of their work and astutely using the vulnerabilities of powerful men for their own ends. 

I admire them; in a system profoundly rigged against women, sex workers, the young, the rural and the poor, they have found a way to get what they can. 

Although it comes at an emotional cost, they seem to have taken control of their own fates. 

True, they live off dirty money: the cash conjured up by their lovers is frequently drained from the public treasury, or extorted in bribes from others. 

But so do hotels, luxury goods stores, estate agents, and the millions of others in China and the West happy to profit from the consumption habits of China’s elite.
The rural women I met were the lucky ones. 

They had been smart, cynical, pretty, witty, or simply fortunate enough to score the top prize — to escape, relatively young, from the brutality of China’s sex trade, dominated by organised crime, and with rape or assault a daily risk, into positions that granted them meaningful agency.
That said, the toxic intersection of power, money and sex holds its dangers. 

Mistresses can end up going to prison, or worse. 

In 2006, Xu Zhiyuan, a Beijing district official, paid his driver to strangle his mistress for arguing with him over ‘trivialities’. 

Duan Yihe, a senior Jinan official, had his nephew-in-law rig his mistress’s car with a bomb in 2007. 

And in 2011, Luo Shaojie, another Beijing district chief, had his mistress chopped up and murdered by his assistant after she threatened to expose his corruption.
‘I know girls who got beaten up,’ Shanshan told me, ‘but my man would never do anything like that. 

He has a good heart; he loves his daughters so much. He’s always showing me pictures of them and telling me how they’re doing in school.’
In an online age, there are other risks, especially at a time when the gender imbalance caused by selective abortion has meant a shortage of young women and a consequent cadre of sexually frustrated, bitter young men. 

‘Slut-shaming’ is a regular habit on the Chinese internet: women exposed by angry ex-boyfriends or lovers’ wives have found themselves the target of a vast wave of abuse, including messages sent to their workplace or their parents.
The most recent ‘crackdown’ on corruption was launched with great fanfare by the new administration of the Chinese president Xi Jinping. 

But it has gone after such easy targets as hospitality budgets, official vehicles and foreign trips, while the real muscle has gone into hunting down dissidents, whistle-blowers and journalists who might actually threaten the powerful. 

As with anti-corruption campaigns of the past, mistresses make a convenient distraction. 

They feed the public appetite for scandal without challenging the way China’s power networks operate. 

The popular media portrays mistresses as ‘beauty attracting disaster’, and speaks of their ‘evil, poisonous nature’, as if the poor officials would never have tasted the apple of corruption without a woman to lure them on.
Yet beneath the public flaming, the pragmatism and cunning of some mistresses has made them folk heroes. One such is Li Wei: now 50, she worked her way up from the Vietnamese-Yunnan hinterlands to a personal fortune via a dozen or so powerful men. 

‘They’re smart women!’ commented my respectable landlady. 

‘These days, a woman has to look after her own bank.’ 

Women who expose their corrupt official lovers receive praise, ironic and otherwise. 

Even the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily has admitted to a grudging admiration.
Still, the public crusades against mistresses, no matter how rhetorical can, in some cases, prompt early retirement from a dangerous profession. 

For mistresses from rural backgrounds in particular, the work is ultimately a means to an end.

‘One of my key informants was kept by a wealthy man for more than seven years,’ the anthropologist Zheng Tiantian wrote to me. 

‘Her man bought her an apartment at the central location in Shanghai under her name, handed her a business under her name, and on top of that, bought her parents an apartment in a city next to their rural hometown. Her parents now work in their own supermarket that they opened. As for my informant, after she left the man two years ago, she went to a college to get a teaching certificate, when she met an ideal man [in her own words], and they were happily married last year.’ 

Zheng noted that most women ‘end the relationship with a sufficient amount of financial capital. They operate their own business while finding a man to marry.’
Or, like Shanshan, they’ll channel the bulk of their money into savings and investments. 

‘Do you think mining’s a good industry?’ Shanshan asked me once. 

‘My friend’s cousin has money in a Shaanxi mine, and she wants me to put 100,000 yuan in it.’ 

With other girls, she talked of stock markets, property, and how to get a Hong Kong bank account.
The social aspect of being a mistress can pay off big-time, too. 

After discovering her lover’s three other mistresses, Wen was able to translate the connections she’d made from socialising with his friends into her own property deals. 

Today she has ‘one house in Hainan, one house in Shanghai, and two houses in Beijing’, as well as a multi-million-dollar business of her own. 

Wen’s lover had made a generous final settlement on her because they had a son together. 

This is rare. 

Abortion is the norm, voluntary or otherwise.
‘You know about [the billionaire construction magnate] Wang?’ said my friend Li, a middle-aged businesswoman formidably tapped in to Beijing’s gossip networks. 

‘He had sex with a karaoke bar hostess at a party a couple of months ago. Now she’s started sending him text messages saying she’s pregnant. But she’s in hiding till the baby is actually born so that he can’t force her to have an abortion. His daughter is at Harvard, but his son has cerebral palsy. So she’s saying that she can give him a healthy son, and she doesn’t want to marry him, she just wants to look after their son. With enough money, of course.’
‘I don’t blame her,’ said Li. 

‘Women need to look out for themselves. Men always cheat.’

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Chinese women flock to sex classes

Sex is a traditionally a taboo topic in China — leaving some adults with no idea how procreation works. New, private classes are changing that.

By KIM KYUNG-HOON

The conservative attitude toward sex in China has slowly been changing as exposure to foreign culture increases.

In an unmarked room at a three-star hotel in downtown Shanghai, Ma Li teaches small groups of Chinese women about a topic that traditionally has been taboo — sex.
The two-day tutorials are not cheap at 2,500 yuan ($420), more than half the average monthly wage in Shanghai. 

But a rising number of women are signing up for Ma’s classes and similar sessions in other cities to learn about the anatomy, psychology and techniques of intimacy.
“I had absolutely no sex education at all. I thought adult male bodies looked the same as baby boys,’” says Sophia Hu, a 30-year-old lawyer. 

“I want to understand myself and the realities of sex.”
Ma, certified by the U.S.-based World Association of Sex Coaches, favours a frank approach to encourage confidence. 

Her lessons include explicit videos of oral sex and appropriately shaped fruit for practice sessions.
She avoids repeating what is available in magazines, saying tips such as “light candles for romance” are dull.
The classes, which started in January, are fully booked weeks in advance, Ma says. 

In Beijing, psychologist Zhenhong Li started her own series of meetings in July for women to talk openly about sex.
China’s conservative attitude toward sex, ushered in by the prudish Communist Party when it took power in 1949, has slowly been changing alongside growing affluence, more overseas travel and exposure to foreign popular culture.
“In Beijing, Shanghai and other big cities, women are very influenced by Western, Taiwanese and Korean culture, so they have very modern attitudes to sex,” says Jay Zheng, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan. 

“But in rural areas, some women know nothing.”
The lack of knowledge is partly because there is little sex education in Chinese public schools.
In 2011, a married couple in the city of Wuhan made the news for believing — for three years — that lying side-by-side on one bed would result in pregnancy. 

Only after a visit to the doctor did the couple, both college graduates, realize their failure to conceive was down to not having sex, Chinese media reported.
“In China, schools are focused on grades, so non-examinable subjects are often changed to ones that will raise grades,” says Maggie Hu, who works for the Guangzhou-based sex education provider SexualityZone.
The women who attend Ma’s classes come from all over China and from various backgrounds. 

Some are 20-year-old students wanting to prepare for their first sexual encounter. 

Others are middle-aged divorcees seeking to regain their confidence.
Many Chinese parents only talk about sex to scaremonger and encourage abstinence, Ma says.
“One of my clients said they were told by their mother that sex is like being shot at with a gun,” Ma says. “Many people will grow up thinking that sex is a dangerous thing or really shameful.”
For Hu the lawyer, who has yet to have a sexual experience at age 30, taking the class has reduced her anxiety and helped her to understand the pleasures.
“When I have sex, I will be more relaxed,” she says. 

“I won’t be as afraid.”

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