Modern prostitution regulation came relatively late to China, in world perspective. While the European powers, beginning with France, established regulatory regimes primarily starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such a regime did not begin to appear in Chinese cities until after 1905. This is rather surprising considering that most of China's Asian neighbors, both colonized and independent, had fully realized systems for regulating prostitution by the 1860s or 1870s. Indeed, in the sections of the few Chinese cities partially controlled by Euro-American colonial regimes, such as in Shanghai and Tianjin, those regimes regulated prostitution in the same fashion as their home countries and other places in their respective empires. But the vast majority of Chinese cities, administered by Chinese governments, did not follow their lead for close to fifty years. By the time regulated prostitution was abolished at the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, nearly all provincial capitals and first-tier cities, as well as many smaller cities, had adopted a regulatory approach for at least some length of time. In fact one might say that it was the “default” position on prostitution, as opposed to criminalization or a laissez-faire approach.

However, while the Chinese style of prostitution regulation resembled its European and Japanese forebears in many ways, it also developed its own unique goals, structures, and implications. Thus during the peak regulatory period, between 1905 and 1937, China's prostitution regulation regime consisted of taxation and registration of brothels, periodic mandatory venereal disease inspections of prostitutes, and regulation of the location of and activities inside brothels, just as in Japan, Europe, and the European empires. However, unlike those regimes, the primary goals of the Chinese regulatory system were neither the racialized separation of colonizers from colonized, nor the control of venereal disease; instead, the goal was the adoption of modern policing and state-building methods, of which prostitution regulation was a key part. Furthermore, in order to defend themselves from early twentieth-century international critiques claiming that prostitution regulation was a form of slavery, Chinese regulators built into the system an official police-run refuge, called a jiliangsuo, for women who wished to leave prostitution.