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Want a Late-Night “Massage” In Guangdong? You’ll Need to Show ID

Posted: 08/11/2014 3:31 pm

The crackdown in China’s undisputed capital of sex continues, despite recent reports that everything is returning back to normal.

That may come as good news to the 200,000 people who lost jobs as a result of the crackdown, which sent people fleeing from the city earlier this year. But while establishments are re-opening, they aren’t quite the same as they used to be.

Reports say that valid photo identification may be required for those late night massage visits, which we believe probably make up a majority of them, if a new proposal is approved. The proposal not only applies to Dongguan, but all of Guangdong Province.

From now on, any visits to a bath house after 2am would be subject to the new requirement. This will, more than likely, have a negative impact on these businesses. On the plus side? It’s sure to inject some stimulus into fake ID shops.

This new requirement has come to light alongside other stiff new regulations we told you about earlier, such as no lights off, no locks on the doors, and no prostitution (of course).

So where are these massage places? Far be it from us to tell you. Just remember, be safe.

 

 

Haohao

Japanese Executive Besieged in Dongguan over Pro-Japan Remarks

Posted: 07/1/2014 6:51 pm

The Japanese president of the Dongguan-based Chang’an automobile factory is trapped in a conference meeting room as more than 1,000 Chinese workers gathered outside to demand an apology over his remarks brushing off the Japanese invasion of China during World War II.

The Japanese executive was on a visit to the factory this morning (July 1) and told several executives in a meeting that Japan did not invade China during the war, but emancipated China from American colonialism, Guangming reported on July 1.

The remarks immediately drew a reaction from a Chinese executive named Zhang Hongquan, and quickly stirred up anger among other executives. By 11:30 am, about 1,000 employees gathered to tell the Japanese boss exactly how they felt about this remarks.

Apparently, the executive has offered to apologise.

Photos: Guangming 

Haohao

Revamped Highway to Connect Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Huizhou

Posted: 06/10/2014 4:41 pm

A revamped highway designed to improve transportation across Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Huizhou will officially open tomorrow, reports Southern Metropolis Daily.

The former Shenzhen-Huizhou 3A and 3B roads have been optimized into the “Shenzhen-Huizhou 3 Line”.

The Shenzhen-Huizhou 3 Line will connect the main traffic artery at Ruyi Road, Longgang District in Shenzhen with Longfeng Boulevard in Fenggang, Dongguan as well as integrating itself from Huiyang, Huizhou all the way to coastal areas on the east side of Shenzhen that include Kuiyong/Kwai Chung, Dapeng, Nan’ao, and Pingshan.

The highway will connect a large number of passenger transfer stations. They include: Qiuchangbai Bus Terminal in Huiyang, Kengzi Street Office, Guohuikang in Pingshan, Wuzhoulong, Shimao Department Store, Longgan Central Bus Terminal, Huangge Cuifan, Yantian Customs, Pinghu Bus Terminal, Foxconn, Huawei, Vanke City, Sakata Private Market, Meilin Joint Inspection Station, and Shenzhen North Station.

Also opening tomorrow will be the “Shenzhen-Huizhou 3 Line Seaside Line”. This new highway will serve Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Huizhou and five surrounding counties, and is integrated with current Shenzhen transportation routes.

Photo: Dongguan Times 

Haohao

Shenzhen Raid Captures Enough Prostitutes to Fill a Basketball Court

Posted: 05/27/2014 2:30 pm

shenzhen vice bust prostitution dongguanA police raid upon several Shenzhen establishments has resulted in the arrest of 69 people in various prostitution-related crimes, reports People’s Daily Online.

After receiving complaints from local residents, several Longhua District brothels masquerading as foot massage treatment centers, leisure clubs, or night clubs were raided by Shenzhen police during the early morning hours of May 19. There were so many people arrested they filled a basketball court.

Many of these sex workers are described as originally coming from Dongguan. They apparently went to nearby Shenzhen when a well-publicized prostitution crackdown occurred back in February. Police say the first half of this year has seen a continuous flow of sex workers from Dongguan entering Shenzhen.shenzhen vice bust prostitution dongguan

Related:

Photos: People’s Daily Online

Haohao

Dongguan workers on strike at Samsung supply factory

Posted: 03/31/2014 7:00 am

Two years ago, South Korean electronics giant, Samsung Electronics Co. was accused of exploiting child labour in several of its Chinese supply factories. Samsung is once again embroiled in labour scandal and unrest as workers from one of its Dongguan supply factories has gone on strike, demanding higher salaries and better social insurance.

Net Ease Finance reported on March 30 that a large-scale worker strike took place on March 29 in Samkwang Science & Technology Co. The company has more than 1,000 employees and manufactures mobile phones and DVD players for Samsung.

One of the workers on strike told the news portal that the Dongguan company deducts RMB 80 (or 8%) from a seasoned worker’s monthly RMB 1,000 salary for social insurance, which the worker claimed to be a large share, the report said.

The report did not specify how many workers participated in the strike and there was no comment from the Dongguan company or Samsung.

In 2013, Samkwang was accused by US-based China Labor Watch of owing payments to workers, discrimination against men, pregnant women, ethnic minorities and applicants over 39 years old, Business Week reported.

Samsung has more than 200 manufacturing suppliers in China. Back in 2012, China Labor Watch accused the Korean company of hiring child labor at six of its plants and two of its suppliers in China.

Here is a photo of the strike scene from Net Ease:

Home page and content page images from Net Ease 

Haohao

Dongguan hospitals beef up security after nurses, doctors beaten up

Posted: 03/12/2014 9:08 am

A patient in wheelchair chasing to hit a doctor in Donghua Hospital in Dongguan (Photo credit: www.timedg.com)

The fearful nurses and doctors in Dongguan turned to helmets, shields and long sticks for protection following various reports of hospital staff being beaten up by angry, drunken and sometimes powerful patients, Yangcheng Evening News reported on March 11.

Forty out of the 47 secondary and tertiary hospitals have finished building hospital police stations in case any staff member might get roughed up. Most of the police stations are equipped with security gear including police batons, stab-resistant body armour, and more.

“Reports of brutality against hospital staff are so frequent and have taken a great toll on doctors. People used to encourage their daughters and sons to become doctors when they grow up, now 90% of hospital staff are against the idea,” said one executive with a public hospital in Dongguan.”Doctors are humans too, and need security. One gets beaten-up just by sitting in the clinic. How can doctors treat patients without being worried about being beaten?”

The report came days after a doctor in Donghua Hospital in Dongguan was hit by a former vice president of the city’s disabled federation and three of his companions. The male doctor was hit in the crotch several times when the cohorts accused him of not treating the former official in a timely manner. He sustained a minor fracture, China News reported on March 4.

Earlier on February 25, a nurse in a Nanjing Hospital was paralyzed after being beaten by an official working in the city’s propaganda department. The official was detained a week after the incident and was dismissed amid public anger.

Home page photo credit: Yangcheng Evening News

Haohao

Dongguan taxation bureau caught touting adult products on its official website

Posted: 02/26/2014 9:05 am

We’ve read that money is tight in Guangdong these days. The government is tightening its spending (so it says), and one local official has recently quit his government post and turned to entrepreneurship, apparently because he wasn’t getting paid enough. But so far, we have to give it to the Dongguan Local Taxation Bureau for the most awe-inspiring way to generate government revenue in this grim financial climate – selling advertisements, including those for adult products, on its official website.

The bureau’s sly move was brought to light after a reporter from Nanfang Daily found the bureau’s official website was teeming with ads selling company loans, phone plans and adult products by typing Dongguan Dishui(东莞地税 )into the Chinese search engine Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google, the newspaper reported on February 25.

One official from the bureau told the newspaper that the domain name – http://www.dgds.gov.cn/ (now the ads are all gone) – was its old website and was abolished last year. The bureau’s new domain name has changed to http://dgltax.gov.cn/, according to him.

He said the two characters Guan Wang (官网), meaning “official website” in English, was generated by Baidu in its search results, and the bureau has contacted Baidu to fix the apparent “mistake”.

Home page photo from Nanfang Daily 

Haohao

Fallout from Dongguan’s sex crackdown: 200,000 jobs gone

Posted: 02/14/2014 9:28 am

We told you yesterday that Dongguan’s crackdown on the sex trade might be costing the city RMB 50 billion ($8.25 billion). Now, it seems that the crackdown is also hitting the sex trade’s tertiary industries.

One insider with connections to the sex trade said at least 200,000 jobs would be affected by the government clampdown. This includes not only the obvious sex workers, intermediaries and “masseurs”, but also those industries that grow because of the trade: taxi drivers, hotel owners, restaurateurs and grocery owners, Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao reported on February 12.

At least 70% of the city’s taxi drivers are making a living from late night Johns, fresh from their “rendezvous,” Lao Wang, a local taxi driver, told the newspaper. A taxi driver can receive up to several hundred yuan in kickbacks by driving a John to a designated hotel or club. Now the midnight cab rides, and resulting kickbacks, are gone and drivers have to endure a long, slow night. “The night is almost through, I haven’t even had one customer,” one driver said.

Given the sensitive times, the cancellation of hotel reservations unsurprisingly spiked.

A Xiaoshang, a Dongguan street where throngs of xiaojie (a euphemism for a sex worker) used to congregate, is now an echoey shadow of itself. Grocery shop owners reminisce about the good old days when the xiaojies busily purchased products necessary for their trade.

Home page photo credit: Wen Wei Po 

Haohao

Baidu heat map shows thousands fleeing Dongguan after crackdown

Posted: 02/12/2014 6:08 pm

Just prior to the Chinese New Year holiday, Baidu published a heat map that showed the most popular travel routes within China. It got some attention for showing which parts of the country were most impacted by the insane chunyun travel rush.

Now it’s being put to use for another purpose: showing what’s happened in Dongguan following the crackdown on prostitution in the city. As you can see below, the rush is on, and it’s in one direction: away from Dongguan.

Asia Sentinel reports a full 10% of the city’s population is involved in the sex trade, or some 800,000 people. And once police began busting brothels, it was time to get the hell outta Dodge:

That prompted an exodus from the city in all directions – although, according to Baidu’s heat map, a full quarter of the departures headed for Hong Kong in a hurry. According to the Tech in Asia website, Baidu gathers data from smartphones with Baidu Maps and other apps using its location-based platform to create the heat map. Baidu Maps alone has more than 200 million registered users and receives 3.5 million position requests every day, according to Tech in Asia. The heat map updates every four to eight hours, showing the most popular destinations, points of origin, and travel routes.

According to the map, in a report made public in the Hong Kong-based Marketing.trade publication, other cities that were destinations for the fleeing tourists were Ganzhou, Jiangxi, Guangxi Yulin, Chenzhou, Hunan and Zhejiang Ningbo. The Baidu live map visualizes the hottest migration routes. From 12 noon to 8 pm, the rush was on.

The question now is whether the sex trade will return to Dongguan, à la regularly shuttered pirated DVD shops, or the party is well and truly over.

Haohao

Is it time to legalize prostitution in China?

Posted: 02/11/2014 3:08 pm

CCTV’s exposé into Dongguan’s seedy sex industry and resulting police crackdown has prompted some to question whether it’s time prostitution is brought out from the dark and into the light as a legalized and regulated profession.

It’s hard for some to fathom, but prostitution is illegal in China despite it being available in brothels, bath houses, “scissorless haircut” barbershops, massage parlours, on cards flung into taxis by touts, and even on the street. It’s so ubiquitous already that the police (for the most part) have turned a blind eye to it.

Many believe the crackdown in Dongguan is a sign the Communist Party, under Xi Jinping, wants to clean up the sleaze. But others are arguing for the opposite. From today’s South China Morning Post:

Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch, said the CCTV report and the ensuing crackdown had unintended consequences.

“It’s a much more wide-spaced debate about the sex trade than we have seen in the past,” he told the South China Morning Post. “For the first time, there is a debate that includes the possibility of legalising sex work.”

“What triggered the discussion this time was how callous the CCTV report was.” Bequelin said. “Its absolute lack of sympathy or understanding has apparently triggered a lot of outrage and indignation.”

In its Tuesday editorial, the Beijing Times blasted the nation’s media for putting sex workers at the centre of their discussions of the sex trade. “If the focus is not put on higher levels [of the industry], and if those who organise and protect the trade are not exposed, […] then there will be others joining the trade tomorrow,” it read.

Those already in the industry face a fine of up to RMB5,000 and 15 days in jail if they’re caught. 

One solution might be found next door in Hong Kong, where prostitution is legal provided it is between two consenting adults in a private room. Would something like this work in China? Is it time to legalize prostitution here?

Haohao
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