Many people didn't think it was worthwhile to raise a daughter. The result was an imbalance in the number of men and women. Many poor men had no hope of getting married and went to prostitutes to reproduce a domestic relationship. Upper class men turned to courtesans who, much like Geisha in Japan, made their wealthy clients feel good about themselves. Scholars and students, despite the prohibition, also went to prostitutes.
Prostitution is gendered labor done to earn money.
So when the state taxed prostitution, it endorsed that kind of relationship between men and women. But more change was ahead. After 1919 the May 4th Movement, a program of cultural renewal, generated discussion about China's future. During this time the Chinese Communist Party was established as was the Nationalist Party. New groups joined traditional Confucian ones in talking about how to restore morality and social order to what they saw as a system gone wrong.