Regulating Prostitution in China

This is a study of regulated prostitution in China and its relationship to local statebuilding during the first half of the twentieth century. Following the lead of European states and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, cities around China began to register, tax, monitor, and sometimes give venereal disease inspections to prostitutes. This book examines how the means that local government chose to shape this institution so integral to, and constitutive of, the system of gender relations ended up transforming local states themselves.