China hopeless campaign to clean up prostitution

The world’s second oldest profession is, it seems, trying to suppress prostitution. The Chinese have been practising it for some time, with the predictable degree of success. Now we hear that the Hilton hotel chain has got into some embarrassment because police in Chongqing claim to have discovered a brothel, masquerading as a karaoke club, in the basement of the Chongqing Hilton. Well, when I say “claim”, I am of course being British and over-cautious: I don’t necessarily believe everything the Chinese authorities tell me, but I am fairly sure that if they say they’ve found a brothel, a brothel is what they have found. The combination of human nature and huge inequalities is always going to produce certain phenomena, with a proliferation of knocking-shops high on the list.