Contents: Today, he realizes a dream imagined by countless African merchants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. He is marrying a Chinese bride. Like many local women dating African men, the trader from Foshan had feared her parents would be racially prejudiced. Today, though they snuck into the underground Royal Victory Church, in Guangzhou, looking over their shoulders for police as they entered the downtown tower block. Non-state-sanctioned religious events like this are illegal on the mainland.
And that makes me half-African, half-Chinese. In Guangzhou, weddings like this take place every day. There are no official figures on Afro-Chinese marriages, but visit any trading warehouse in the city, and you will see scores of mixed-race couples running wholesale shops, their coffee-colored, hair-braided children racing through the corridors.
In the bustling 7km stretch from Sanyuanli to Baiyun, in northern Guangzhou, Muslim Uyghurs from the restive northwestern province of China serve freshly baked Xinjiang bread to Angolan women balancing shopping bags on their heads. While prostitution controls have been relaxed at a local level, [ citation needed ] there is no impetus for legalisation at the central government level.
Importantly, legalisation does not have much public support. These include the lack of independent trade unions , and limited access of individuals to civil redress with regard to occupational health and safety issues. The spread of prostitution practices has introduced a large quantity of slang to the popular vocabulary.
Prostitution is a popular subject in the media, especially on the internet. Typically news of police raids, court cases or family tragedies related to prostitution are published in a sensationalised form. A good example is news of an orgy between Japanese clients and Chinese prostitutes in , which, partially because of anti-Japanese sentiment , was widely publicised and met with considerable outrage.
