Not Just Another Pretty Face.(sex trade in China)

When Xun, a petite, ponytailed, 23-year-old from Sichuan province, became the first member of her family to get into college, she knew attending the prestigious university in China's southern city of Wuhan could lift her family out of generations of poverty. Laid-off workers with no social security, Xun's parents subsisted on income from the small convenience store her father owned. In Wuhan she landed work as a waitress, but the pay barely covered her tuition. When a manager from a local hotel offered her a job making more than 10 times what she earned waiting tables, she felt too exhausted, alone, and embarrassed at the possibility of going home to refuse. She became a prostitute.

Each time a man comes to her hotel asking for someone as clever as she is willing, Xun's boss calls out for a "Number One." On a scale of four, it's the highest ranking, reserved for college girls. But that's hardly a source of pride for Xun. "One has to survive and keep one's life going, and I have to just ignore the negative side of what I am doing now," says Xun, who will soon be a senior at Zhong Nan Financial University and asked that only her first name be used. "I've been able to send money back to my parents on a regular basis. I don't dare send them too much because they will suspect where it came from."

In cities across China, prostitution has become so widespread that even the educated elite are getting into the business. The Communist Party all but stamped out the sex trade in the 1950s, in part by forcing neighborhood spies to note the arrival and departure of male visitors to each household and by declaring pimping a capital offense. But the practice was resurrected in the 1980s when China introduced capitalist- style reforms. Desperate women who lost state jobs and benefits sold themselves to eager, newly rich men. Today there are more than 10 million prostitutes across the country.

No longer are all of them uneducated factory workers; college students and recent graduates, too, are joining the oldest profession. Many come from the countryside to the big city unprepared for the high cost of living or the materialistic culture. Some receive no financial support from their parents and cannot afford tuition doing a legitimate job. Others envy their classmates who manage to pay their fees and also treat themselves to fancy dinners, wear the hippest clothes, and jet off on weekend excursions. For many of these women, prostitution represents an escape from the bleak, circumscribed lives led by their parents--factory employees, poor farmers, or laid-off workers. "There is a high demand for the well-educated call girl," says Li Yinhe, a well-known sex researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Prostitution is a major embarrassment for the party, which early on built its reputation on wiping out social ills. So the central government largely ignores it, even as sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS and gonorrhea rage across the sex worker population and threaten the health of the country. That willful ...