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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in Northeast China, this paper examines how sexual foreplay services emerged under a “triple-post” (COVID, socialism, and industry) condition, shaped by state governance, local economies, and everyday anxieties, and how this transformation produced new imaginaries of desire.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Northeast China (Dongbei, historically known as Manchuria), this paper situates the economic dynamics of contemporary sex workers within what I call a condition of “triple-posts”: post-pandemic austerity, post-socialist institutional legacies, and post-industrial decline. In developmentally blocked cities marked by population loss, fiscal contraction, and shrinking employment opportunities, intimate service economies have become a key site where governance, survival, and desire are renegotiated. Following the nationwide anti-prostitution campaign centred in Dongguan in 2013, which coincided with the first year of the Xi administration, sex markets organised around penetrative intercourse were rapidly dismantled. In their place emerged a form of commercial intimacy referred to as “sexual foreplay.” Neither fully legal nor explicitly criminal, foreplay involves non-intercourse practices such as erotic touching, sensory stimulation, affective performance, and guided fantasy. Under post-pandemic austerity, it has become the dominant mode of sexual commerce in many urban leisure venues. I further suggest that this transformation reveals how specific modes of governance generate specific markets. For local governments confronting tightened political discipline and economic exhaustion, such services constituted a negotiable grey zone through which employment and revenue could be quietly reassembled. Meanwhile, workers recalibrated bodily labour as techniques, while consumers, particularly young men, were cultivated into new desire logics that reshaped their understandings of money, romance, and women. Through this lens, the paper examines how embodied imaginations are reconfigured in China’s triple-post condition.