Intimate Economies of Rehabilitative Work: Policing Sexuality through Wage Labor and Re-Education through Labor in China

This paper begins to theorize the intimate labor regimes of the “rehabilitation industry” in China. It examines the collusion between transnational interests, the state and the market through two types of vocational training programs for sex workers in China. In China, state-sanctioned rehabilitation through labor (RTL) programs serve as mandatory sanctions for prostitution offenses; at the same time, American evangelical Christian missionaries recruit sex workers to work as jewelry makers, and label them as victims of human trafficking to transnational consumers and activists. These programs aim to generate economic alternatives to labor migration and sex work. However, the focus on labor training and re-education as the animating force of social mobility ignores the complex labor, gender and ethnic hierarchies that exist within the intimate labor industries. Opening the black box of this new industry, my work will investigate the connections between the local and global and question the optimism around the transformative potential of “good work.” 

This paper is based off 28 months of ethnographic participant observation at an evangelical Christian vocational training center in Beijing, China, and pairs this with preliminary analysis into the historical and contemporary practices of rehabiliation through labor in China.