This paper describes preliminary findings of a study on female sex workers in the labor market field in Northeast China. The study focuses on the female sex workers’ occupational mobility, introducing their work experiences, comparing their different jobs as a sex worker and others such as waitress, massagist girls, peddler, and exploring the reasons why they chose sex work as their job. The paper utilizes a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods including more than one month intensive fieldwork (informal deep interview, community based observation) during the data collection period and basic statistic analysis using SPSS10.0 after transfering the qualitive materials into data. 103 female sex\|workers were involved in this study.The study finds out half the famale sex\|workers we interviewed are Xiagang female workers, and almost all of them are from urban areas, which indicates the reduction of the anonymity that necessary for the profession of sex work on condition that the females encountered economy crises. Moreover, the occupational mobility from the jobs after Xiagang to being as a sex\|worker is some kind of horizontal mobility instead of downwards as most of the people portrayed. The study also analyzes four kinds of “relationsohips”( Guanxi ) that play different roles in their continual job hunting process: no relationship (depend on themselves), relative based relationship, friend based relationshiip(formal occupation agency).The paper argues that friend\|based relationship wins the bid ultimately.
