Portal:Sexuality/Featured article

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Prostitution in the People's Republic of China has become more visible since the loosening of government controls over society in the early 1980s. In spite of government efforts, prostitution has now developed to become an industry. Most prostitutes are female, though in recent years male prostitution has also emerged. Venues typically include hotels, karaoke venues and beauty salons.

Shortly after taking power in 1949, the Communist Party of China embarked upon a series of campaigns that purportedly eradicated prostitution from mainland China by the early 1960s. But even then a distinctive feature of Maoist China was women providing sexual services to Communist cadres in exchange for privileges. More recently prostitution has become associated with a number of problems, including organized crime, government corruption and sexually transmitted diseases. There are fears that prostitution may become the main route of HIV transmission as it has in developing countries such as Thailand and India.

The government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has vacillated in its legal treatment of prostitutes, treating them sometimes as criminals and sometimes as behaving with misconduct. A number of international NGOs and human rights organisations have criticised the PRC government for failing to comply with the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, , failing to recognize voluntary prostitution as a legitimate form of work and penalizing women who sell sex while exonerating men who buy it.

See also Prostitution in Hong Kong and Prostitution in Taiwan.