Sex and Work on the Move: Money Boys in Post-Socialist China

Abstract

China’s reconfiguration of the state and the market in its reform era has created new spaces and opportunities that have attracted millions of rural migrants to urban centres in search of freedom, wealth and new identities. However, the new space and the self both remain constricted by post-socialist parameters and the market. Based on ethnographic research on the male sex industry in post-socialist China (2004–2014), this article studies one such group of the rural-to-urban migrant population, namely male sex workers, or ‘money boys’ in the local parlance. Building on existing migration and prostitution literatures in China and my previous work, this article examines the ways they become money boys and manage three stigmatised identities – rural-to-urban migrant, men who sell sex and men who have sex with men – in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. This article concludes that money boys represent a group of the new migrant generation with distinct needs and desires, which is simultaneously embedded in the neoliberal discourse of development and empowerment, and at risk of dislocation and isolation.