A man left the lobby of the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing. As he walked towards the taxi stand a young woman fell into step beside him. They had a brief conversation. She was rebuffed. Another lady accosted him, then another. By the time the visitor got away he had fought off four prostitutes.
I watched this scene repeated several times in the space of a few minutes while parked outside waiting for a friend one evening. There were two dozen young women hanging about the entrance. The word in Beijing is that about 100 prostitutes "work" the Sheraton and the police leave them alone if there is no trouble or muggings of clients.
It is the same at the nearby five-star Kunlun Hotel, owned by the People's Liberation Army. As dusk falls groups of young women in slit skirts gather by the entrance looking for clients.
Despite official disapproval, prostitution is thriving in hotels, karaoke lounges, massage parlours, saunas, bath houses and barber shops throughout China. Disguising brothels as barber shops is an ancient Asian tradition which has been revived. Recently Beijing Express, a daring television programme by Chinese standards, used a hidden camera to show a reporter being offered a "special" massage in a hairdressing salon which had a staff of three pretty women but no scissors or hair-dryers.
The police later visited the establishment and arrested the employees, but the authorities seem to be fighting a losing battle against a tidal wave of prostitution which has accompanied the opening of the country to a brash consumer culture. A women can make more from one successful encounter with a foreign or wellheeled Chinese client outside a Beijing Hotel than in a week working in a department store.
Any male who travels around China finds that the sex trade is widespread and takes many forms. One businessmen said he was taken to a banquet by his host-partner in a central China city and then, when tired and emotional, offered entertainment upstairs in a karaoke bar with several private rooms for "singing" alone with a hostess.
In a big city hotel, catching the eye can be taken as a contract of employment, as another company representative found when he glanced admiringly at a woman in a silk dress in the lobby and found she had linked his arm.
When travelling with colleagues in southern China last year, two young women in leather shorts attached themselves to our group in the bar of a Shenzhen hotel, and when it became clear that there was nothing doing, they loudly demanded 200 yuan each (£20) for their time. This pay-for company scam is common practice in the seedy Wan Chai bars in Hong Kong, the one-time haunt of Ms Suzie Wong where unwary tourists can find themselves presented with a huge bill just for chatting to bar girls.
The southern resort island of Hainan, the Hawaii of China, has become a cheap and convenient sex destination for millions of Chinese men who cannot find lifelong female partners because of family planning policies which have resulted in a low female birth rate. The population imbalance of this generation has helped bring about an explosion in the flesh business at a time when AIDS is becoming a big threat.
A month ago China's official Xinhua news agency reported that prostitution was one of two causes of an outbreak of HIV in China, the other being the multiple use of needles by drug-takers. The Health Ministry said China had 8,303 HIV cases at the end of October last year. Outside experts like Dr David Ho Da-i, a Taiwanese-born American, say the figure is closer to 200,000.
The government is waking up to the fact that AIDS is not just a gay or western disease and last month circulated foreign embassies for advice and funds to establish an anti-AIDS programme which they suggested would include an Internet information centre and the promotion of condoms and textbooks on sex.
Hainan, Shenzhen and other Chinese sin cities are rivalled as sex tourism destinations by the tiny Portuguese colony of Macau which has a reputation as a place where Chinese men can get something different - foreign bodies. The flesh market there is dominated by Thai and Filipina women and a recent influx of prostitutes from Columbia.
They have replaced the dyedblonde Russian prostitutes who haunted the Macau casinos but have disappeared following a scandal in 1994 when a Hong Kong lawyer fell in love with a stunning 19-year-old from Vladivostock and both were murdered in Russia after he tried to get her out of the business.
The public security bureau in China occasionally cracks down hard on prostitution and imprisons the organisers, and for a while the prostitutes and pimps lie low. One man in the southern city of Zhaoqing found that even telephone sex can be risky. A court in Zhaoqing city convicted him of illegally using mobile telephone numbers to call a Hong Kong sex line, and jailed him for life.