THE CONDOM QUANDARY

3.2 Anti-prostitution Campaigns
The Chinese government has historically taken a punitive approach towards sex work
and sex workers. In the 1980s, the government began regularly carrying out “strike-hard”
campaigns 43 and “anti-pornography crackdowns” against the sex industry. 44 Although the
strength and reach of these campaigns varied, they all targeted female sex workers and their
related work venues with the aim of completely eliminating the sex industry. The crackdown
on sex work was very severe in the 1980s and 1990s. According to statistics published by
the Ministry of Public Security, the police investigated and prosecuted a total of 620,000
people for prostitution-related offenses between 1984 and 1991; 250,000 between 1992 and
1993; and more than 2 million between 1993 and 2004. 45 In April 2010 and February 2014,
strike-hard campaigns against sex work in Beijing and Dong’guan respectively, spawned the
harshest national anti-prostitution campaign in more than a decade. The police manpower
deployed, the geographic area covered, the number of sex work venues shut down, and the
number of people arrested were unprecedented. 46
Local governments are motivated by political and economic factors to actively engage in
anti-vice campaigns. After the “reform and opening” 47 from the 1970s to the 1990s, the
shortfalls in the budgets of the local PSBs led to an increase in activities to “earn income
from fines and penalties,” which became a major internal motivation for anti-vice sweeps
targeting sex workers and their clients. However, in the early 2000s, public security funding
increased, and a policy of “separation of revenue and expenditure” was implemented. 48
The decrease in economic incentive to collect fines and penalties was matched by a
de-prioritization of vice raids. However, in order to maintain a certain anti-prostitution
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