Society

A woman in southwest China has been executed after being convicted of forcing 22 schoolchildren into prostitution, state press said Monday.

Zhao Qingmei was put to death in Guizhou province "in recent days" after her final appeal was rejected, the Guizhou Daily reported.

Zhao was convicted with six others of forcing the 22 pupils, some of whom may have been as young as six, and an older girl into prostitution in the impoverished mountainous province from March to June 2006, the paper said.

Zhao was also convicted of aiding her husband in the rape of a child, it added.

Nanning Police take operation on prostitution after Beijing and Chongqing.

22nd, Jun. 2010, at Jinfuying Hotel, dozens of prostitutes caught by local police. In the same time, 30 prostitutes' clients.

The Beijing police operation is dubbed “Operation 4.11″ and began in April, reasoning that driving out an estimated 200,000 xiaojie (mistresses) would increase the vacancy rate. The result would be a flood of new residences on the market that would decrease property prices.

The idea was recently supported by the Beijing Evening News — considered a mouthpiece for the Communist government — in a May 14 editorial titled Turning point will come when all mistresses are driven out of Beijing.

The editorial argues the crackdown could drive out Beijing’s prostitutes in a mere three months. Lofty aspirations.

A counter editorial in Asia Times however questions the reasoning of driving out prostitutes to correct inflated housing prices.

Prostitution is illegal in China, but the police crackdowns recently launched across the country indicate that the "world's oldest profession" is doing as well as ever. In Beijing, there are reportedly so many xiaojie (mistresses) that state media claim their numbers have driven up housing prices.

After efforts to "physically and spiritually" cleanse Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, prostitution has made a big comeback, so much so that municipal police launched a citywide "strike hard" vice crackdown in April entitled "Operation 4.11".

A growing number of foreigners have been involved in drug trafficking in the country, latest figures from Chinese courts and customs showed.

Local courts in the Chinese capital tried 36 cases of drug trafficking that involved foreigners last year, 12 times the number in 2006, the Beijing Higher People's Court said on Thursday, two days before the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

The drugs trafficked by the foreign defendants were mostly heroin and methamphetamine of high purity, with the drugs trafficked by each foreign suspect weighing an average of more than 1 kg, the court said.