I’m fine with Mimi Lau fooling management, but she should have been honest with the workers, so they could decide whether or not to take the risk of disclosing information about their lives to her. Plenty of ppl have decided to risk speaking to the press under similar conditions. And I feel differently about Ye Haiyan’s “volunteer” work–like, yeah, it seems faintly ridiculous to me in some ways that she didn’t take the money, but at least she was sharing the conditions of the workers.

Unfortunately, talking to reporters is outlawed, as the article describes. So journalists are forced to go in disguise if they are to find out any information about the 10-yuan brothels. Maintaining that disguise is best for everyone’s protection: “If sex workers were found to be talking to a reporter, they would be arrested and fined and the whole sex shop would be raided and shut down. Many would lose their jobs.”

Perhaps it can be argued that the reporter is endangering the sex workers by visiting the brothel at all. But Ye Haiyan also posed as a sex worker in the 10-yuan brothels last year in order to get information about that very underground world. She “worked for free” for two days, because this was the only way to be allowed to see what the conditions are like. According to this account, Ye Haiyan told the Global Times in 2012, “Without working as a prostitute, I couldn’t imagine what happened in that teeny tiny dingy place.”

Neither Ye Haiyan nor Mimi Lau, the SCMP reporter, are sex workers. Both disguised themselves as sex workers in order to have a taste of that particular world in the interest of exposing unjust conditions; and neither truly “worked” as a sex worker – since Ye Haiyan’s brief volunteer stint can not fully count as “working.” The difference is that Ye Haiyan was more committed to her project, as far as we know, and put her activism at the forefront; whereas Mimi Lau, who has written multiple sympathetic articles about Ye Haiyan for SCMP, is expressing her activist viewpoint in a less direct way.

Good call — we should definitely have a post addressing that.