Oddly agitated, with none of his signature chirp, Li Bo calls me in the dead of the night, saying his shop has been shut down by the cops, and he wants to meet up and head to the police station in the morning. Bleary-eyed, I agree, and as abruptly as he called, he hangs up.
Awake again after sunrise, I take a bus to the address Li texted, somewhere in the depths of Shenzhen’s Longhua district. Sex Doll Head Only
As the bus crosses the Pearl River Delta expressway, there are no more immaculate skyscrapers or intertwined roads, but matchbox houses crammed between hardware stores, noodle shops and property agents.
At the entrance to one cluster, a banner stretches between two poles, reading, “Internet Prostitution is Still Illegal”. Down an alleyway, atop a two-storey building, a shop sign reads “Love Love Happiness”.
As I approach, Li swings open glass doors, hair ruffled, dark circles under his eyes, wearing a long-sleeved black Thermowear shirt. We shake hands and the 36-year-old ushers me in, rambling on about an encounter he had had the day before.
When the police arrived, Li says, he had one customer inside, who happened to be naked at the time.
“How many times have you been here?” one officer barked.
“It’s my first time,” the young man replied.
“It’s a corruption of social customs!” the officer said.
“Please don’t take me away,” the young man begged. “If I get a police record I’ll lose my job.”
The young man locked himself in the bathroom for five minutes, dazed, before getting dressed and leaving the shop. Li says the police then sealed the doors of all four of the shop’s private rooms, citing illegal activity.
The large Xs of paper seal on the doors are still there when I visit. Li points to an exhibit case fastened to the wall. “Look at this one. It looks more real,” he says. “Look at the head, the skin colour – you can even see the veins.”
Inside the glass case stands a life-sized silicone doll in a low-cut red dress and black fishnet stockings, wavy, chestnut hair draped to perky breasts, hands resting peacefully over her abdomen.
Li leads me further down the hall, circling through a passage behind the rooms, where we enter one through a secret door so as not to disturb the police tape. He lifts up a blanket on the bed, revealing a similar doll lying underneath.
“Touch it,” says Li. “Feel it for yourself, especially her chest.”
Li is the proud owner of what he calls a doll brothel, or, in his more formal pitch, a “Silicone Doll Experience Hall”. This recently raided space is the second of two Love Love Happiness branches he owns, both in Longhua, which together house more than a dozen dolls.
Most are full body, two are waist-down only, all are available to rent for less than 200 yuan (US$29) an hour, to be enjoyed in a private room. When guests are finished, cleaners enter through the back doors to give the dolls, and the room, a good scrubbing.
Li says he often asks his customers for feedback, which he then gives to the producers, and they have already implemented some suggestions. One repeated request was to reinforce the kneecaps, because customers often pry the legs open and it strains the doll’s joints.
The modified dolls are in the rooms sealed by the police, so he can’t show me, Li says, with a hint of regret. One doll, he says, is hooked to a mechanical crane hung from the ceiling, so the customer can move it around as they use it. Another, designed by his team, has hot water inside and can imitate a real woman’s body temperature.
Li was proud of what he had started and had planned to develop more models with the doll producers based on customer feedback, until the previous night’s police raid ruined everything.
“This is my only way of scraping by,” says Li, as we sit down at the reception area for tea. “In Shenzhen, people like me can’t make a living that easily.”
The people Li is referring to are the legions of nongmingong, or rural migrant workers, defined by China’s Bureau of Statistics as “people with rural household registration [hukou] that engage in non-agricultural work near their home, or leave their home for work for more than six months a year”.
Those who work in construction or factories congregate in big cities such as Shenzhen, but they can seldom afford to live in the districts they build.
In 2021, according to official statistics, there were about 292 million migrant workers in China, more than a third of the country’s working population. Like most of them, Li’s story begins in a poverty-stricken village, in the mountainous region of Hubei province, as the youngest of four children in a family of nine.
His parents, siblings, grandparents and an aunt all lived in a three-bedroom house with mud walls at the foot of a 1,700-metre (5,580-foot) mountain. Li’s father, a village official, earned about 60 yuan a month.
With Li’s mother leading the way, it took family members countless trips to cultivate and maintain their steep, rocky plot, ferrying baskets of animal manure on their backs.
The family mostly ate their own corn and potatoes, and Li’s mother raised four pigs a year, three of which she would sell, with one killed and used to make the family’s annual sausage supply.
“Nothing on that pig would be wasted,” says Li. “We preserved all the meat, the intestines, even boiled the fat to make lard, which served as cooking oil and needed to last an entire year.”
One year, he says, they ran out of oil, so ate only boiled vegetables for two months.
Li’s siblings left home for the cities when they were about 13 to work in factories or as nannies in rich people’s homes. Li’s mother didn’t like the idea of her baby daughter taking care of other people’s babies and wept, but the family had no choice.
Seeing his siblings out there making money and sick of doing homework, Li dropped out of school after his first semester of junior high, but he didn’t find work right away.
After a year or so idle at home, sometimes helping to herd the family sheep, a neighbour took him to the southeastern province of Fujian, bribed the director of a shoe factory with a carton of cigarettes, and found the underaged boy a temporary job moving boxes.
It was a physically demanding job, but Li had grown up carrying 50kg (110lb) of cow manure on his back for 5km (3 miles) at a time. He adapted well. For the first month, he was paid 3,000 yuan for all the extra hard work he did – about four times the national average salary at the time.
For a few months after that, Li bounced around between two more shoe factories. He was quick to learn the trade, much better at this than he was at studying. He worked on assembly lines, learning the various parts of making a shoe.
At one posting, he had to take out the sole of the shoe from the oven, coat it with glue and hand it to his neighbouring worker who would adhere it to the upper part of the shoe. It was one simple movement, but a tough job.
Li found he couldn’t operate with precision when he wore gloves, so he picked up the soles with his bare hands.
“My fingertips had blisters, I couldn’t even hold chopsticks and had to eat with a spoon,” he says.
“But you still need to go to work and just suck up all the pain.”
The employees worked an average of 15 hours a day on the assembly line, with 72 hours of overtime each month. Living conditions were grim – a dozen people shared a room, a whole floor shared a bathroom sink.
When they woke in the morning, mosquito bites peppered their bodies. In the cafeteria, rats ran freely, stealing their rice noodles. But worst of all, they had no entertainment.
Then, one night, 14-year-old Li had a wet dream. He woke up, uncomfortable and confused, took off his underwear and stuffed it under his bed.
The next morning, he was found out, and a roommate, nicknamed Fatty, went around spreading the news.
“All 300 people found out, they were vastly interested in this, even more than they would be in a pay rise,” says Li. “They needed some gossip.”
For the next few days, colleagues would pat Li on the shoulder, joking, “Maybe we should take you to a prostitute.”
But he was not amused, and he wanted revenge. Over the next few nights, he waited until everyone went to sleep, to see if anyone else might need to tuck their underwear under the mattress.
One night, in the light of the moon, he spotted someone. A roommate seemed to be sleeping, but a part of his blanket was moving robotically, up and down. Li immediately turned on the light, the roommate was revealed, hand still on his penis, and the factory had a good laugh for days.
As he recounts this experience in his shop reception, Li realises his and other people’s behaviour back then demonstrated a lack of sex education. People wanted to talk about sex, but didn’t know how to do so.
A few years down the road, Li would recall that his own lack of education – and his growing need for sexual activity – was all but universal.
Even now, Li says, the same taboos abound in China. After opening the sex doll shop in 2018, Li says he found himself in the role of sex educator. His neighbours would often send their children to him – too embarrassed to answer their questions themselves.
One boy ran into Li’s shop yelling, “Li Bo, Li Bo, why is there hair on people’s ‘small chick’?”
“Call it by its name,” said Li, “call it a penis.”
“What’s the difference between your penis and your nose but shape and function?” Li asks, sipping his tea, still more stories to tell before we head to the police station.
Joking about masturbation is one of the most vivid memories Li has of factory life, so sensory-deprived were their young, curious minds. A couple of years of that and he quit, travelling halfway across the country to northeast Shandong province to join a friend in a pyramid scheme, because he “heard it could make money”.
It did not, and Li spent the next decade and a half trying to start various businesses – a night market stall in Beijing, a mine in Shanxi, a pizza restaurant in Shenzhen, but none lasted long.
He blamed his professional failures on changing government policy and his lack of resources. “You have to have connections,” he says, “otherwise you can’t provide bigger services.”
When his last business before the doll brothel, a property agency in Shenzhen, went bankrupt, his partner stole the company car and sold it in secret through his connections.
“I was indebted, doubted myself; I was anxious, confused,” says Li. By then in his 30s, Li sunk into a depression. For days, he couldn’t sleep. When he stood on higher floors of buildings, he had the urge to jump.
To relieve his misery, Li took up power walking, wandering aimlessly for 20km a time. One evening in 2017, standing on a footbridge in Shenzhen’s factory district, Li noticed an exceptional number of men in the crowds – about one woman for every 10 men.
He thought back to his factory days, realising that the gender ratio in these places hadn’t changed at all over the past decade. Surely their unfulfilled desires hadn’t lessened either.
Li pauses his storytelling to look at the time. We have to get going soon, he says, and calls a nearby restaurant to deliver two bowls of clear-broth beef noodles, and after a quick lunch, I accompany him to the local police station, where he will try to appeal his case.
We enter a large waiting room and queue beneath a banner that reads “We serve the people”, as those in front of us complain about being scammed by a date they met online, a business partner disappearing, or being pickpocketed.
Li remains lighthearted, listening to the woes of those around us and giving a few suggestions to some on how to handle being scammed.
On Li’s turn, he pulls me up front, telling the officer, “This is a reporter, she will document things.” The policeman looks at me, emotionless. “It’s fine,” he says. “We welcome journalists, as long as they do not film in secret and post the videos in a way that twists the facts.”
The officer then calls a supervisor, who appears from one of a row of offices down the hall. After chatting with Li for a short time, another comes out.
Li repeats his practised speech about his shop, the abrupt shutdown and why he believes he was not breaking any laws. He recites regulations, trying to make his claim appear more legitimate but at the same time careful not to irritate the officer.
This is a “new, emerging industry”, he explains, and there are government policies that encourage such industries. There may not be a rule that deals specifically with sex dolls, but Li believes there soon will be.
Luo Xiang, a professor of criminal law at the China University of Political Science and Law, says in a video on his blog that “prostitution refers to sexual relations between unspecified people of the opposite sex or between people of the same sex with money and property as the medium.
“The main bodies of prostitution are people, and the adult experience centre is between people and items, so it is not illegal for silicone dolls to provide sexual services.”
However, Luo says that Li’s shop might fall under the crime of disseminating obscene materials for profit. But so far, Li hasn’t been able to confirm the reason why his shop was shut down.
“It’s not my intention here to complain …,” says Li.
“Even if you do, it’s fine,” the senior officer cuts him off, before going on at length about the provincial policies they are following that required them to shut down Li’s shop, including those regarding fire hazards, business-operation safety and, however it applies to Li’s dolls, prostitution.
He says the whole industry is quite “sensitive” at the moment, and public security bureaus worry about secret prostitution businesses that they cannot control. This is why, he says, this station sent officers to Li’s shop – he has received orders from higher bureaus on a crack down generally.
“If you think there’s something wrong with the general policy, you can take your complaint to the city government,” the officer says. “It’s not our police bureau that won’t allow it; we are only the enforcer. We don’t have anything against you, we are just carrying out the policy.”
Seeing that he cannot win, we leave the station and, standing on the busy street outside, Li spends half an hour on the phone complaining to other public security departments.
“Why do you have to provide a sexual experience shop?” one officer says to him. “Why can’t you just sell adult sex products?”
“If you search Love Love Happiness, there are at least 300 million searches online,” he explains to me later. “And I created this industry.”
At this point, it has become clear that there was no way to resurrect his shop. On the car ride back to his shop, Li has fallen silent, reminiscing the prosperous days of his business. A few years ago, when he first launched it, Li had high hopes for the industry.
After Li’s observations on the bridge in 2017, he took to wandering the streets filled with migrant workers, distributing cigarettes and striking up casual conversations about their jobs. Then, once they had let down their guards, Li would steer the talk towards sex, asking where they would usually find women.
“Where the f*** can we find women?” one worker answered. “I heard Foxconn has lots of women, that’s why I applied for a job there. Then I found out it was full of dudes. I got tricked!”
Most workers Li surveyed said they would fulfil their needs by masturbating, just like his factory colleagues a decade earlier, but a couple of people talked about sex dolls. Back then, the most common type was a blow-up one, skin made with polyvinyl chloride (PVC), filled with air.
One man told Li that six people in his factory dormitory had pitched in to buy a doll and took turns with it. They soon found that one guy was too lazy to wash the doll, and when the others felt too disgusted to use it, that man monopolised the doll for himself.
The more stories Li heard, the more sure he was that he could start a business to answer the needs of countless bored and horny workers. A year later, Li carried out his plan but, just his luck, the launch coincided with a crackdown on the sex industry.
The campaign had begun in 2014, with an unexpected crackdown on prostitution in the “sin city” of Dongguan, an hour from Shenzhen, following a report by state broadcaster CCTV.
Footage taken by journalists using hidden cameras revealed in vivid detail various underground prostitution activities in a number of luxurious hotels-turned-brothels, showing scantily clad women parading on a stage and venue managers speaking openly about prostitution services.
Chinese media reported that 67 people had been arrested and 12 venues shut down, while Guangdong provincial party secretary Hu Chunhua stressed the need “to conduct an extensive trawling-style crackdown on the entire city”.
Worried, Li checked with his local government offices, but the answers he received were ambiguous. He asked whether he could open the business, one department said they were not sure, another said it did not come under their jurisdiction.
“If none of them want to deal with this,” he recalls thinking, “then I will go right ahead.”
So he rented a shop in Longhua, decorated it and visited more than 20 factories to shop for dolls. He first purchased 10 dolls: one for each of the five rooms, and five in the front for advertising.
He arranged three of them to sit near the front window, around a table, “playing poker”. Many passers-by did a double take when they saw the dolls, but they never came in. Soon, Li received complaints, saying the dolls’ clothes were too explicit.
In the first two weeks, Li had two customers, so he hired a man to help with advertising. It worked. At night, the Love Love Happiness flagship store quickly filled up. At its peak, more than 30 people sat in the hallway, and more sat on the stairs, waiting to use one of the five rooms.
Back at the second, raided branch of Love Love Happiness, I ask if Li would describe his customers as low-key.
“Low-key can’t even begin to describe them,” he says.
“How would you describe them?” I ask.
He thinks about it for a minute and says, “sneaky”.
In the beginning, his customers would act as if they were doing something bad. The room of mostly migrant workers would never exchange glances, never talk; everyone with heads bowed to glowing phone screens.
One time, while people were waiting in the hall, they all heard the rhythmic sounds of bed springs squeaking and it defused things a little, allowing Li to talk about the dolls and even explain how to best use them.
I contacted a couple of Li’s regulars, but they would not agree to a meeting, only to speak on the phone while remaining anonymous.
One, who wishes to be called Zhang Jin, tells me he went to Li’s first branch regularly for a year. At that time, he was working on the assembly line at Foxconn, Apple’s biggest iPhone production facility in China.
Over the past decade, the plant has found itself mired in one scandal after another: worker suicides, delayed wages, harsh, almost insufferable working conditions. In 2010, a research report jointly produced by 20 universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland called Foxconn a “labour camp” that severely violated China’s labour laws and abused workers physically and mentally.
The 83-page document, which includes interviews with more than 1,800 workers, says the factory forced staff to work double or triple the legal limit of hours, had a Spartan management style, extensively employed teenagers and failed to report industrial injuries.
Strikingly, the report states that at least 17 Foxconn workers had attempted suicide that year alone, with 13 of them succeeding.
As a single 30-year-old, Zhang said working at Foxconn meant a low income, little free time and, most importantly, no way to meet women. He saw an advertisement for Li’s shop and felt curious. It was the first time he had seen anything like it, he says.
“But I felt [his dolls] were safe,” he says. “You didn’t have to worry about illegal stuff or the spread of disease. I’ve seen how he sanitises them.”
Throughout 2018 and into 2019, he would go to Li’s first shop once a month, sometimes twice. At that time, Li’s business was flourishing. Sometimes Zhang would find himself in a queue. Men sat in Li’s reception area, waiting, drinking tea, casually chatting among themselves.
“I don’t know why they would seal such shops,” Zhang says. “Real-person prostitution is illegal, but if they don’t allow real people or even this, the government should give each one of us a wife.”
Another customer, Tian Gang, tells me he came to know about the shop through a friend’s WeChat posts. He was immediately drawn to it.
“I was startled when I first saw the doll,” he says. “It looks like a real person.”
He didn’t feel ashamed, and thought it was a good way to meet his needs. He says that working in the factory, he didn’t have what he felt it took to attract women, with “little knowledge, little experience, looking silly”.
Male Sex Doll “This is what we are like, those of us at the bottom of society.”