BEIJING (AFP) — One of the most notorious symbols of prostitution in Beijing has reopened in another signal that the city's bustling vice industry has roared back to life following an Olympic crackdown.
Maggie's and another bar in Beijing's diplomatic quarter that used to fill nightly with Chinese and foreign prostitutes reopened this week after having been closed since before the August Games.
Maggie's doors opened again on Monday, staff there said, and the bar was crowded this week with its usual assortment of Mongolian working girls flirting with foreign men.
"Everything is back to normal now. We are open for business again," a bartender said.
The two venues were among the countless casualties of a Beijing police crackdown aimed at preventing the city's rollicking sex industry from tarnishing the August Olympics.
The campaign saw hostess bars and dodgy "massage" centres around the city closed for months, and many of the city's street-walkers cleared away.
However, vice establishments have been reopening recently and street-walkers have been sighted again as the security grip ebbs.
Staff at Maggie's, which was shut up early this year, had told AFP during the clampdown that the bar was closed for a fire inspection, but expected to reopen after the Olympics.
Staff at the bar this week repeated that explanation.
Prostitutes had said during the clean-up operation that many sex workers had been driven out of Beijing by police and some of the foreign ones deported.
The crackdown was part of a much broader makeover aimed at sweeping the city's less savoury elements under the rug, and which saw campaigns against drug offenders as well as spitting and queue-jumping by the general public.
Basically stamped out during the puritanical Mao Zedong era, prostitution flourishes in today's more open China, with estimates of the country's sex workers ranging as high as 10 million or more.
Sex workers ply their trade with virtual impunity in bars, massage spas, karaoke parlours and the "barber shops" that are found in many Beijing back alleys and which have nothing to do with haircuts.
Male travellers typically receive phone calls shortly after checking into Chinese hotel rooms, asking whether they want a girl sent up.
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