But what do sex workers themselves have to say about these issues? These eighteen interviews were gathered as part of an extensive research project for the author’s 2012 book, Selling Sex Overseas. Every year, the United States alone spends hundreds of millions on programs to combat human trafficking and rescue trafficked victims. The author, an expert in the field of criminal justice, frames these personal accounts with contextual details and incisive commentary to provide a rich understanding of the realities and myths of prostitution and global sex trafficking. The women’s candid stories put a human face on globalized commercial sex and off er a raw, inside view of the moneydriven transnational sex industry.

These are just two of the eighteen Chinese women interviewed in this book about how they came to sell sex in Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Los Angeles, and New York. Kelly taught preschool in Beijing for ten years before moving to LA and opening a brothel.

In Chongqing, Ling Ling had been a waitress earning twenty-five dollars a month a few years later in Hong Kong she was making six times that each day. The Chinese Heroin Trade is a fascinating, nuanced account of the world of high-risk drug trafficking in a tightly-controlled society. Chin and Zhang also explore the marked characteristics of heroin traffickers the relationship between drug use and sales in China and how China compares to other international drug markets. Based on face-to-face interviews with hundreds of incarcerated drug traffickers, street-level drug dealers, users, and authorities, paired with extensive fieldwork in the border areas of Burma and China and several major urban centers in China and Southeast Asia, this volume reveals how the drug trade has evolved in the Golden Triangle since the late 1980s. Which organizations are behind the heroin trade? What problems and prospects of drug control in the so-called “Golden Triangle” drug-trafficking region are faced by Chinese and Southeast Asian authorities? In The Chinese Heroin Trade, noted criminologists Ko-Lin Chin and Sheldon Zhangexamine the social organization of the trafficking of heroin from the Golden Triangle to China and the wholesale and retail distribution of the drug in China. Burma is blamed as the major producer of illicit drugs and conduit for the entry of drugs into China. In a country long associated with the trade in opiates, the Chinese government has for decades applied extreme measures to curtail the spread of illicit drugs, only to find that the problem has worsened.

Heijin by Ko-Lin Chin