Sex in China

Elaine Jeffreys, Haiqing Yu

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745685946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Sex in China introduces readers to some of the dramatic shifts that have taken place in Chinese sexual behaviours and attitudes, and public discussions of sex, since the 1980s. The book explores what it means to talk about sex in present-day China, where sex and sexuality are more and more visible in everyday life. Elaine Jeffreys and Haiqing Yu situate Chinas changing sexual culture, and how it is governed, in the socio-political history of the Peoples Republic of China. They demonstrate that Chinese governmental authorities and policies do not set out strictly to repress sex; they also create spaces for the emergence of new sexual subjects and subjectivities. They discuss the complexities surrounding the ongoing explosion of commentary on sex and sexuality in the PRC, and the emergence of new sexual behaviours and mores. Sex in China offers clear, critical coverage of sex-related issues that are a focus of public concern and debate in China - chapters focus on sex studies; marriage and family planning; youth and sex(iness); gay, lesbian and queer discourses and identities; commercial sex; and HIV/AIDS. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars both of modern China and of sex and sexualities, who wish to understand the role that sex plays in contemporary China.

1
Sex in China: Introduction

Move over Mao, today's Chinese revolution is sexual.

Lynch 2003

When China opened its doors to international markets in the early 1980s, it inadvertently let in another modern phenomenon – the West's sexual culture.

Braverman 2002

The Chinese landscape – in its material and virtual, as well as geographical and social dimensions – is increasingly a sexually charged space.

Zhang, E. 2011: 109

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has been undergoing economic and social change at a rate and scale that is unprecedented in world history, ever since the country abandoned socialist-style centralized planning and adopted market-based economic reforms, with a policy of opening up to the rest of the world, in December 1978. Population mobility was severely restricted in China after 1958 to meet the requirements of centralized economic planning, a system wherein the Party-state allocated work and distributed resources, and therefore needed to know the identity and location of its workers. Along with the gradual loosening of restrictions on population mobility since the mid-1980s, an estimated 262 million people have moved from rural to urban parts of China to find work, chiefly in low-income sectors such as construction, services, transport and manufacturing (Wang, Y, 2013). Highlighting the runaway nature of China's building boom, the PRC's ‘cement industry has been the largest in the world for at least the past 20 years’, reportedly accounting for more than half of the globe's cement consumption in 2011 (Edwards, P. 2013). The pace of development and urbanization in China has been so fast that some commentators claim it is the equivalent of Europe's Industrial Revolution, only collapsed into the space of thirty to forty instead of 150 years (‘The second industrial revolution’ 2004).

These changes have been accompanied by equally dramatic changes in public discussions and expressions of sex and sexuality. Numerous scholars contend that during the revolutionary Maoist era (1949–76), and especially during the Cultural Revolution period (1966–76), ‘to discuss any aspect of personal life, romantic relationships or sex was considered bourgeois and hence taboo’ (Honig 2003: 143). ‘There was a dearth of both public and private discussion of sex during the Cultural Revolution’, says anthropologist Mayfair Yang (1999: 44). In fact, the ‘slightest suggestion of sexual interest was considered so ideologically unsound that gendered tastes in hairstyle and dress were coerced into a monotonous uniformity of shape and colour .… a sexual sameness, based on the defeminization of female appearance and its approximation to male standards of dress’, says historian Harriet Evans (1997: 2).

In China today, sex and sexuality have become visible and publicly discussed components of everyday life, as the quotations at the start of this chapter suggest. Unlike in the Mao era, when public expressions of sexual intimacy were rare, young and elderly couples holding hands and kissing are now common sights in Chinese streets, parks and eateries. Advertising billboards, replete with sexualized images of young men and women promoting ‘must-have’ consumer goods, adorn the exterior walls of upscale shopping malls, alongside government public-service advertisements. Glossy images of young ‘sexy’ bodies feature on the cover pages of the many men's and women's fashion, beauty, celebrity, health, and lifestyle magazines that are displayed on streetside newspaper stalls. Nightclubs with pole dancers and transsexual karaoke shows vie for custom with bars trying to attract more male drinkers by offering free drinks for women on ‘ladies' nights’. Dating shows are a popular reality-television format and ‘talk-back’ radio shows offer advice on sex-related matters. The development of the Chinese Internet has also resulted in a proliferation of sites for engaging with sex-related matters, including: gay and lesbian support services; commercial matchmaking sites; sex blogs; soft pornographic images; and celebrity and political sex scandals.

The dramatic nature of these changes when compared to the perceived sexual austerity of the Mao era has led numerous commentators to claim that China is undergoing a sexual revolution (‘China undergoing sexual revolution’ 2003; Lynch 2003; Pan, S. 2009: 22; Zhang, E. 2011). For some, the use of the expression ‘sexual revolution’ is simply a shorthand means to capture the altered nature of China's contemporary sexual culture when compared to that of the Maoist period. For others, it indicates that the PRC is embracing western-style modernity, as demonstrated by claims that Chinese sexual practices will soon ‘catch up’ with those of western societies (‘China undergoing sexual revolution’ 2003). For yet others, it is a signifier of broader and arguably more significant political change. As one earnest young scholar explains:

There is a revolution going on in China. It is not the Long March, The Great Leap Forward or The Cultural Revolution. There is no great Helmsman at the fore. No one person caused this revolution. The Revolution is a revolution of the senses, the mind, the body and the individual. As the party-state withdraws itself from the intervention into the personal realm, it does so concurrently with the rise of the heroes of sexual freedom, liberators of the self. (Edwards, J. 2011)

The ‘sexual revolution in China’ narrative has proved to be popular with English- and Chinese-speaking commentators alike because it appeals to common-sense understandings of how things were and are. It suggests that sex was repressed by the Communist Party-state during the Mao era. In contrast, the ‘natural’ desires of the Chinese people are now being liberated as a result of the loosening of government controls and the introduction of modern western influences.

This narrative is incorrect. The next section explains why.

Rethinking the History of Sex in the PRC

Historical studies demonstrate that ‘insofar as there is a story of repression to be told’, the role of the Mao-era state in repressing sex and sexuality is far from obvious, even in the Cultural Revolution period (Honig 2003: 154). The early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initially paid considerable attention to promoting sexual equality, especially for women. The PRC's first Marriage Law was promulgated on 1 May 1950, only seven months after the People's Republic was founded. That Law outlawed China's traditional ‘feudal marriage system’, including bigamy, polygamy, and arranged and mercenary marriages, and implemented a new system of free-choice, monogamous marriage based on equal rights for both sexes (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyin fa 1950]). The early communist regime also set about eradicating prostitution and venereal diseases, describing them as emblematic of unequal class and gendered relations (Abrams 2001: 429–40; Jeffreys 2012b: 96–7). A broad range of materials were issued through the Party-state publicity system in the 1950s and early 1960s to educate the public about the new Marriage Law and its importance for women, and to promote sexual hygiene (Evans 1997: 2). These publications, as suggested by titles such as ‘Establish a Correct Perspective on Love’, and ‘Talking About the Age of Marriage From a Physiological Point of View’ (Evans 1997: 2), promoted a normative view of appropriate sex/uality as adult, monogamous, heterosexual and marital, rather than pre-marital, casual, extra-marital, homosexual and commercial, which may appear conservative from contemporary perspectives. But they also demonstrate that public discussions of sex and sexuality were not exactly ‘taboo’ in the Maoist period. It is more accurate to say that they were articulated in a different manner and in relation to different concerns from the ways in which sex-related issues are articulated today.

The role of the Mao-era state in repressing sex and sexuality during the Cultural Revolution is also unclear, despite claims that the communist repression of sex reached its zenith at this time. In an article titled ‘Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited’, Emily Honig (2003: 154) notes that there were no official declarations prohibiting non-marital romantic or sexual relationships. In fact, novels and personal memoirs released after the Cultural Revolution indicate that it provided previously inconceivable opportunities for teenagers to experience love and sex, as youthful Red Guards travelled around China together without parental supervision, and many urban youth were separated from their families and ‘sent down’ to the countryside to learn from poor peasants, while alleviating urban employment pressures (Honig 2003; Min 2009). Scattered statistics available from army corps suggest high levels of cohabitation and pregnancy (Honig 2003: 161). Sent-down youth were also known to have circulated handwritten copies of pornographic stories (Link 2000: 243), and imperial and Republican-era novels featuring romantic and sexual themes (Honig 2003: 157–8), which had stopped being printed or being available for sale along with the CCP's curtailment of the monetary economy and establishment of a state-controlled media.

At the same time, some members of the many different Red Guard factions bullied, harassed and condemned other people for prioritizing ‘love’ over ‘revolution’, and for being immoral (Honig 2003:153–4). Local cadres in rural areas sometimes penalized young people, and destroyed their future career-life prospects, for engaging in pre-marital sex, especially when such romances resulted in pregnancy (Honig 2003: 151–3). An official document issued in 1970 demonstrates the existence of sexual abuse and sex-related corruption, by stating that cadres who raped female sent-down youth would be penalized according to the law, and those who forced them into marriage would be subjected to criticism and struggle (‘Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian zhong fa, 1970, 26 hao’ 1970).

The preceding examples point to a more complicated relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘power’ than the narrative of a monolithic communist state oppressing people in a top-down fashion allows. The absence of prohibitions on non-marital sex, other than regulations designed to halt sexual abuse and sex-related corruption, show that the Party-state did not act strictly to repress sex, nor was it exactly ‘silent’ on the subject of sex. The perceived ‘silence’ on sex-related matters during the Maoist period is an effect of the primacy accorded to the imported discourse of Marxism in the state-controlled media, and the reorganization of social space to meet the requirements of centralized planning, which included the restriction of commercial spaces. Sex-related issues clearly became enmeshed in broader political and social movements, which were nevertheless interpreted differently by different people in different locations. This point is illustrated by the fact that some young people used their freedom from parental supervision to engage in sexual experimentation during the Cultural Revolution period, while others condemned them by conflating pre-marital sex with sexual immorality and ‘unrevolutionary’ behaviour. It is also illustrated by the fact that some local cadres used their patriarchal-style authority to penalize pre-marital sexuality, while others exploited that authority to suit their own venal purposes.

The claim that sex was actively repressed by the Mao-era state has proved to be popular, despite varying degrees of historical inaccuracy, because it appeals to what philosopher Michel Foucault (1978) calls ‘the repressive hypothesis’. Foucault notes that conventional accounts of the history of sexuality in western societies posit a standard trajectory. An original period of ‘natural’ openness was followed by a chronicle of increasing repression that culminated in the constraints of the puritanical Victorian era, where sex was confined to marriage for the purposes of procreation. All other non-(re)productive expressions of human sexuality were stigmatized and silenced, along with the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society. Hence, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been characterized by multiple, but as yet unfinished, attempts to free us from those shackles, and admit the full diversity of human sexualities, as demonstrated by the women's liberation movement, and struggles for lesbian and gay rights.

Foucault (1978) challenges such narratives (the repressive hypothesis) by showing how the very ‘putting of sex into discourse’, from the end of the sixteenth century to the present day, has led to a proliferation of sexual identities (albeit pathologized ones), and encouraged us to speak out about sexuality as both the truth of ourselves, and an act of courage against oppression. He argues that the Christian practice of confession established a compulsion to talk about sex in relation to the inner self, which became a secularized practice after the Reformation. Public discourses on sex were further expanded by the emerging concerns of modern nation-states to ensure prosperity by managing the life, health, reproduction and longevity, etc., of populations.

By illuminating these historical links, Foucault (1978) demonstrates that power does not act strictly to repress sex; it also produces new kinds of sexual subjects and sexual subjectivities. He further suggests that we have become attached to the repressive hypothesis, despite its lack of theoretical rigour, because talking about sex in terms of liberation from repression activates the ‘speaker's benefit’. That is, it gives the speaker or writer the aura of being attached to an important political cause, and even being a people's prophet or hero.

Foucault's argument concerning the positivity of power can be illustrated with reference to China's one-child-per-couple policy. The policy was introduced during 1979–80 as a means to guarantee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• China Today series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Map
• Chronology
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Note on Chinese Names
• 1: Sex in China: Introduction
• 2: Marriage and ‘Family Planning’
• 3: Youth and Sex(iness)
• 4: Gay, Lesbian and Queer
• 5: Commercial Sex
• 6: Sex and Public Health
• 7: Sex Studies
• 8: Concluding Comments
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement