A police officer holding handcuffs during a police crackdown action on prostitution in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, Sept. 2012. (Photo : www.straitstimes.com)
Intense government crackdown on sex trade has driven more sex workers in China to relocate to other cities or countries in an effort to evade arrest, the Global Times reported.
An employee working to protect sex workers' rights at Xiyan Communication Center in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, confirmed this to the news site.
The report said that the large number of sites where illicit sex trade and prostitution occurs vanished after a series of crackdown were conducted against the highly lucrative trade around the country in recent years, which included a destructive raid in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, dubbed as China's "sex capital," last February.
The report cited several surveys which showed that some sex workers from the mainland have changed careers, migrated to other cities where anti-prostitution operations are more lenient, or went overseas to seek other employment.
The Oriental Morning Post said that there were an estimated 250,000 sex workers in Dongguan, and nearly 100,000 of them worked in saunas, hotels or clubs. The Shanghai-based paper said that the remaining 150,000 walked the streets or worked in hair salons.
The report added that a prostitution ring led by five male and five female from the mainland, who were working as pimps and prostitutes, was busted by Macao police on April 22, Wednesday.
Some Chinese sex workers have gone overseas to work as the Paris-based Lotus Bus project team, founded by the organization Doctors of the World. Reports said that there are now over 1,300 Chinese sex workers in the city.
Some sex workers also went to Singapore, where the government designated several red-light districts to enable them to control and regulate the illegal sex trade, a policy that attracted a few Chinese sex workers.
A social worker said that Hong Kong, Macao and Malaysia are also destinations for outbound sex workers, and some even went as far as London, San Francisco, New York, Dubai, Tokyo and Rome last year.
The Hong Kong-based South Morning Post reported that many prostitutes went to Hong Kong last April following the raid in Dongguan, and some of them stayed in luxury hotels to serve their clients.
