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By Duncan Rhyne (2010)
There are three kinds of locations where teenage prostitutes are encountered in China: Internet cafes in cities, barber shops in towns, and small-town discos.
Internet-based teenage prostitutes are a new phenomenon in China. It has risen because Internet use is indeed widespread, even in the population segment that only has basic education and does not have the means to buy their own computers. Internet cafes are found everywhere, even in villages, and they quite possibly are the cheapest in the world.
Furthermore, chatting via QQ is a national pastime among the young, the unmarried, and the married looking for secret opportunities. Many teenage prostitutes use QQ to solicit paid dates.
Foreigners will have a hard time getting in contact with teenage prostitutes via QQ. But many of these teenage prostitutes work out of Internet cafes, where one can see them chatting with about ten men at once. Some of them have a definite interest in foreigners (as they may be paying more), and may approach foreigners on their own (in the Internet café, not via QQ).
Barber shops are ubiquitous in Chinese provincial cities, but not so much in the centers such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. They often do not provide full sexual services but just manual sex. Some of them, in South China more often than in the North, have teenage attendants. Sometimes they work as regular staff members that provide hand jobs just as the other staff members, and sometimes, they are there just for limited, non-sexual services, such as washing the hair of customers, or giving head massages.
In China, discos and other sexual entertainment places can be found even in small towns. While in larger cities, nightspots tend to be expensive even by European standards, the smaller a town, the cheaper they tend to be. Furthermore, the smaller a town, the less there appears to be government or police control. Thus, age limits tend to be imposed less strictly. (Apart from national age-of-consent laws, there are numerous local regulations that set rather high age limits for the presence of young people in night life entertainment places.)
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Copyright Duncan Rhyne