Shenzhen's prostitute parade

The Guardian reports that in Shenzhen, police paraded a bunch of prostitutes and johns in public:

As part of a two-month crackdown on vice in the booming city of Shenzhen, public security officers handcuffed about 100 women and some of their male customers, dressed them in bright yellow prison tunics and hauled them through the streets.

Using Baidu's new blog search engine we found some more information on this matter, including an open letter to the National People's Congress from Shanghai lawyer Yao Jianguo who says that such actions not only show no respect for individual dignity but are unlawful in themselves -- there were laws passed in the 1980s that made the Cultural Revolution era parading of counterrevolutionaries a thing of the past.

Speaking of the Cultural Revolution, notice that in the above link (which is in Chinese), among the Chinese characters are the Roman characters "WENGE" and "RENQUAN." WENGE=文革＝Cultural Revolution and RENQUAN=人权＝human rights. We gather, at least from our own experience, that these are not written in Chinese because you cannot post those words on a blog. Several months ago, when we tried posting the characters for Communist Party in a blog post it told us that we could not publish the post and that our I.P. address was being recorded. Shanghaiist couldn't believe his eyes and promptly fled to Happy Donuts, the best donut shop in Palo Alto, California, where we could lose ourselves in an anonymous crowd of free wi-fi users. Lawyer Yao is calling for the NPC to take a clear stand on the issue and make a public declaration in that regard. He also feels that there needs to be more legislation to prevent such things from happening ever again. It is sobering, to us, to think about the fact that this happened in Shenzhen -- sure, we know what goes on in that city, but you'd think that one of the most affluent areas in China which is so closely linked to Hong Kong, would have been beyond resorting to such measures.

The video above is from a Hong Kong news broadcast. We don't understand Cantonese, and the subtitles are not that clear, but the video is pretty self-explanatory. One thing we noticed is that not only were these people paraded, at one point the police read out their names, birth dates, and their crimes. We found that video here and there are some more, but it seems most of them are duplicates.

Image from here.