Local officials found that hundreds of cafés and e-sports venues in Yiwu were offering maid café-style services, with female servers forced to kneel to serve tea, massage male customers, and shout “Welcome home, my master!” to anyone entering.

The procuratorate brought a public interest lawsuit to a local court, arguing that such services “belittle and damage women’s rights to human dignity.” They also said that some local businesses had failed to take measures to protect their female staff from sexual harassment.

[…]

“Maid cafés have been a symbolic space where women are defaulted to being the subject of sexual exploitation,” Chen said. “The key to solving this problem should be educating the public to respect women.”

Sounds like banning this might not be such a bad thing? Stricter regulation and severe penalties for violators would maybe help instead, but I don’t know enough about Chinese culture to really be able to comment on whether that would even be effective. At least taking steps to make sure this doesn’t continue is a net benefit, I think.