Newest Playboy Club To Open In China

[matcom]

<snip>

SHANGHAI — May a hundred bunnies bloom.

Playboy Enterprises Inc. said Monday that it planned to open a club here, the largest city in a country where the government keeps so tight a check on pornography that Playboy magazine is banned.

Playboy Club Shanghai, scheduled to open late next year, would mark the revival of the members-only establishment, which got its start in Chicago in 1960. The last of the 22 U.S. clubs, celebrated for the wait staff's uniforms of fishnet stockings and corsets festooned with fluffy cottontails, closed in 1988.

"The bunny is back," said Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who like many a Chinese emperor favors silk jackets.

Chicago-based Playboy said it was partnering with a local company, Shanghai Entertainment Ltd., to open a 120,000-square-foot complex with three restaurants, a two-story disco, a two-story cabaret with skyboxes, a spa, a wine bar and a cigar lounge in Changning district, where many foreigners live and where Hooters of America Inc. recently opened its first restaurant.

"The current cultural and business climate in Shanghai, coupled with the Playboy brand's extraordinary strength in Asia, give us an exciting opportunity," said Christie Hefner, Hugh Hefner's daughter and chairwoman and chief executive of the company.

Just a decade ago in Shanghai, "almost all nightlife was seen as suspect," said James Farrer, an associate sociology professor at Sophia University in Tokyo and author of "Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai." These days, "it's seen as part of development."

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-fi-playboy7dec07.story

[NewJeffCT]

1. First Hooters & now this

Maybe I should tell my wife that I was serious when I said that she should look into prices of a villa just outside Shanghai just after the election...

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

2. Is she hot?

(Sorry, couldn't help myself. The Devil made me do it. :evilgrin:)

[NewJeffCT]

3. my wife, yes

However, I had meant it that Shanghai seems like an interesting place to be now and my wife is going through an interminable green card process now, and it's certainly becoming more liberal sexually than many places in the US.

My wife wouldn't work in the Playboy Club and isn't qualified for Hooters.