ABSTRACT
This chapter centres on various issues of gender politics in the borderlands. It starts with the prevalence of borderland sex business and tourism and how the illicit sex industry has obtained a ‘green light’ from the local authorities. In the 1990s and 2000s, the borderlands fed much to the Chinese imagination of a sexualized border. Male Chinese visitors often expected some sort of sexual adventure when touring in the border towns. On the other hand, intensified cross-border contacts between men and women on the two sides of the border also facilitated increasing cross-border romance, wooing games and marriages. The open border has provided Vietnamese women with new choices for building their happiness. Vietnam is not as developed as China (for the borderland inhabitants, this means Hekou). Vietnam, in the eyes of some Vietnamese women, is not only less economically developed, but is also less developed in terms of women-men equality. Vietnamese women find that life for women in China is happier and more comfortable. An increasing number of them have turned to Chinese men across the border for lifelong partners, unleashing a new desire to advance one’s happiness and distancing the conventional ideal model of Vietnamese women as submissive wives in the family and self-sacrificing females for the state.
