It is the darkest scene of China's economic miracle, and it is performed in every city at night. Prostitution – the consumption of women's bodies as a demonstration of power, wealth and prestige – unfortunately returned as a fixture of China's urban environment 30 years after its forced elimination by the state. In the name of entertainment, with the promotion of cosmopolitan consumption in a global economy dominated by the service industry, women's bodies are given price tags and skilfully packaged for sale to the male customers in the karaoke bars that have become popular in China's urban landscape. With two years of intensive ethnographic research among karaoke bar hostesses in the north-eastern seaport Dalian, Tiantian Zhang exposes the various aspects of how the world's oldest business once again gained legitimacy in urban China.

The book can be read in three parts. In part one (Introduction, chapters one and two), Zheng surveys the political and economic history of Dalian, a city occupied by the Japanese in the first half of the 20th century. Zheng highlights the Japanese colonial impact, including the system of army comfort women, upon the city's mindset, especially with respect to defining masculinity and shaping attitudes towards women and the Japanese, as well as the concept of modernity. With the rise of entrepreneurial masculinity in the post-Mao period, Zheng concludes that “entrepreneurs regarded sex consumption as a form of resistance against the artificial shackles placed on human sexuality by an unnatural socialist system” (p. 10). Patronizing luxurious karaoke bars became a legitimate lifestyle choice; women became “a testing ground for male entrepreneurial ability” (p. 10).

Zheng's theories regarding the Japanese impact upon the city's general attitudes towards entertainment and women is not further developed in the ethnography, but the concept of entrepreneurial masculinity is explored in more depth later in part two (chapters three and four) through the application of Susan Brownell's theory of body symbolism to a consideration of the hierarchical karaoke bars. Zheng wrestles with her theoretical question: why would adulterous and exploitative men interpret their own promiscuous behaviour with the karaoke hostesses as a form of resistance? Through her historical review, readers can easily come to the understanding that these men were resisting the emasculation that was caused and imposed by the Maoist socialist system. Secondly, Zheng explains that men attributed their patronage of hostesses to their unhappy marriages. However, Zheng's investigation of the possible causes for the unhappiness that these men experience in their marriages needs to be more specific. With the “refeminization of women” in post-Mao society and the new “heightened sexuality” that permeates popular culture, both men and women become victims of an unrealistic ideal of “modern” marriage that is based on women's desirable sexual image and subservient position. Then why would men get the legitimacy to be promiscuous? Finally, Zheng illustrates that purchasing illegal sex services was perceived as a demonstration of a man's courage and an effective way to contest “socialism and the politics of the whole country” (p. 131). The post-Mao market economy created a moral vacuum within which, according to the state's claim, a series of social ills, including prostitution, will continue to exist and will “presumably … disappear once mature socialism is achieved” (p. 128). This claim by the state legitimized and excused the existence of corruption, unemployment, laid-off workers and drastic social stratification. At the personal level, a prevailing cynicism emerged.

In part three (chapter five, six and seven), Zheng turns to the hostesses' perspective on the re-emergence of prostitution. Starting by accompanying some of the hostesses on their returns to their rural homes, Zheng depicts a holistic picture of how rural migrant women transcend the overarching rural–urban boundary through the manipulation of their own bodies and emotions. Consumption is the magnetic centre that sustains and organizes all of Zheng's arguments. By arguing with Daniel Miller, Zheng re-characterizes the hostesses' consumption as a “cultural negotiation of power through and within the enabling and constraining rural–urban apartheid system” (p. 176). To the hostesses, consumption is no longer simply a personal and individual behaviour, but rather a representation of the public character of rural migrants searching for a precious urban identity.

Red Lights is an ethnography that intends to reveal the underlying dynamics of the sex industry in urban settings in China. Two systematical barriers – the rural–urban boundary and patriarchy – intensified the toilsome experience of rural migrants in the cities. Hostesses continuously utilize filial discourses to justify and lend legitimacy to their behaviour. What Zheng's ethnography ultimately shows is that the scarcity of institutional opportunities in China's cities leads rural migrants on a dark, risky journey in their quest for upward mobility in urban China.