Browbeating Prostitution?

Abstract

In the last few years, with the increasingly rapid development of urban conditions, there has been much agitation in China for various kinds of social and municipal reform. The agitation was at first limited to such metropolitan areas as Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton; but as a result of the success of the Nationalist cause, and following the establishment of municipal governments along modern lines, many hithertofore second-rate urban centers, including the capitals of many provinces, have come to the front championing officially the cause of social amelioration. The clamor from Nanking, which is now the national capital, has been particularly sonorous.

Nevertheless, the vociferous cry, “Down with prostitution”, raised by many moralists of the last and of the present generation, is at once stupid and laughable. For all the anger in the world is merely an idle waste of energy, unless the institution against which that anger is directed has been thoroughly analyzed and understood, and until the causes of which that institution is the inevitable outcome have been discovered and uprooted.

—Robert Michels in Sexual Ethics

(Originally published in The China Critic, Vol. I, No. 16, September 13, 1928, by the name of: Quentin Pan)