The League of Nations, Prostitution, and the Deportation of Chinese Women from Interwar Manila

Abstract:The 1933 League of Nations report on the traffic in women and children across Asia included a passing mention of the deportation of nine hundred Chinese women from the American Philippines. In the League's decades-long campaign aimed at the abolition of state-registered brothels, Manila, with its red-light district shut down since 1918, was regarded as a model for the suppression of the sex industry. This article considers the extent to which the criminalization and deportation of Chinese women was encouraged by the League of Nations' anti-trafficking campaign and whether the authorities and women's organizations in Manila shared the League's agenda. It highlights American discourse on prostitution as a police matter and suggests that abolition policies, combined with the targeting of Chinese women, undermined the aims of liberal feminist internationalists.