Regulating Prostitution in Republican China: International Models and Domestic Adaptations

Elizabeth Remick will talk about regulating prostitution in China from 1911-1949 at Harvard University.

During the Chinese Republic (1911-49), and in many parts of China beginning ten years or so before that, brothel prostitution was legal and regulated.  Although weak central governments did not mandate this, it gradually became standard practice around the country in cities both large and small.  In spite of social opposition and brief periods of suspension in some places, regulation always returned as the apparent “default” approach to dealing with prostitution. Professor Remick will discuss the origins of this model in Europe and Japan, describe its transmission to and diffusion within China, and show how its implementation in the Chinese context had different consequences and meanings from those in its original European context.

Elizabeth J. Remick is an associate professor in the political science department at Tufts University.  She studies local politics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century China, with particular interests in state building, taxation, and gender.  She is the author of Building Local States: China during the Republican and Post-Mao Eras (2004); "Police-Run Brothels in Republican Kunming" in Modern China (2007); and "Prostitution Taxes and Local State-Building in Republican China" in Modern China (2003).