.     A bar owner in the eastern China province of Jiangsu has been brought to
      court for hiring male prostitutes for homosexual customers.

      The People's Court of Qinhuai District in the province's capital of
      Nanjing found that Li Ning, who runs the "Zhengqi Bar" in a downtown area
      of Nanjing, hired young men as prostitutes to work at his bar from January
      to August, 2003, and pocketed more than 100,000 yuan (about 12,050 US
      dollars) in profit.

      Li, 33, is a homosexual himself, and was a shareholder in the "Hongdu Bar"
      in downtown Nanjing, which was closed by local police in 1999 for staging
      erotic shows.

      In January 2003, Li, disturbed at declining business, began to introduce
      male prostitutes to his homosexual customers.

      In street posters and recruitment ads in local newspapers, Li said he was
      looking for handsome young men to work as public relations clerks, the
      court found.

      Li soon recruited a group of 18- and 19-year-olds, most of whom were
      heterosexuals but accepted the job. Li charged them a deposit of 300 yuan
      each, but most of them were able to earn at least 200 yuan a day.

      Li was arrested in August, 2003, right when his business started to boom,
      but was released for a while because local police could not decide whether
      the prevalent criminal law applied to Li's case, as it did not have a
      specific clause on whether organizers of homosexual prostitution should be
      punished, or how.

      The case was reported to the Standing Committee of the National People's
      Congress, China's top lawmaking body, and its legal affairs committee
      ruled in October that Li should be prosecuted, because all mercenary sex
      acts, whether they were between homosexuals or heterosexuals, were against
      the law.

      In line with Chinese laws protecting citizens' privacy, the court hearing
      of Li's case was a closed one, and court officials have not disclosed any
      information about it.

      Wang Zhiming, another organizer of male prostitution, was sentenced to
      three years in prison and fined 3,000 yuan by a Shanghai court in July
      2003, according to an earlier report in theNanjing Daily.
      　
      http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200402/08/eng20040208_134190.shtml
      .