Some Stirrings on the Mainland

By John Leo

After a night of frenzied dancing, Zhen Zhen came to grief when her boyfriend entered the room while she was taking a bath. Yen Li, who yearned to be an actress, lost her virtue when a wily actor insidiously told her that Ingrid Bergman and Sophia Loren devoted their lives--and their bodies--to art. The pivotal event of Li Na's life occurred when her date tricked her into watching a porn movie. "She was shocked by the movements on the screen, and she felt warm and suffocated. As she was about to unbutton her collar to breathe a little, a hand grasped her."

These cautionary tales confront wide-eyed readers of the new book Girls, Be Vigilant!, an official publication of the Chinese government. The usually puritanical press is blossoming with articles on sex, one sign that traditional policies of sexual repression are undergoing attack. The sex-crime rate has soared, particularly cases of rape, which is sometimes defined to include simple seduction. Divorce is also up, and the New China News Agency reports that "disharmonious sexual life arising from a lack of sexual knowledge" is now placing great strain on many families.

Opinion polls conducted by various journals show that attitudes are rapidly changing. As recently as 1982, 80% of those surveyed in one study said premarital sex was immoral. In late 1985 polls put the figure between 60% and 65%. To no one's surprise, sexual repression is less popular among the young than the old. In a fall 1985 survey of married people in the Peking area, only half of the under-30s, in contrast to three-quarters of the over- 50s, said they opposed sex before marriage.

To some extent the findings of the polls are a by-product of the government's decision to bring sex out of the closet by allowing new sex manuals and setting up courses on sex and marriage. In September, Shanghai opened its first School for Newlyweds, offering two-week instruction on sexual life, hygiene and contraception. Couples who had been married several years, still feeling ignorant in the field, signed up for refresher courses. Forty of the city's more than 400 secondary schools are experimenting with sex-ed courses for twelve- and 13-year-olds. These courses concentrate on physiology and hygiene and a few "moral concepts of sex." The emphasis on physiology is hardly standard. Chinese society has been so reticent and the Communist regime so straitlaced that sexual anatomy was usually omitted from physiology courses. Many newly married couples take to the bridal bed with only a foggy notion of what they are supposed to do.

The government plays on the widespread ignorance of sex by issuing dark warnings about many sexual practices. A 1984 government book for newlyweds on health says that promiscuity brings brief pleasure but also a loss of will, a generally low character and possibly neurasthenia. Even the wedding night has its perils. The book warns that husbands who do not know the location of the female genitals can cause severe damage. "Though such cases are rare," the book says, "they are worth noting."

While China's leaders do not believe that masturbation results in hairy palms and blindness, the book states that the practice can lead to "dizziness, insomnia, too much dreaming, exhaustion, aching in the back and waist, worsening of the memory, absentmindedness, lack of appetite, palpitation, shortness of breath, headache, dimmed vision, mental decline." Girls, Be Vigilant! helpfully lists some of the traditional remedies for illicitly roaming hands, including the cultivation of a "rhythmically arranged life" and good habits such as avoiding tight clothes and not sleeping on your stomach.

In the cities, China's high-ranking officials have access to prostitutes, porn films and a varied sex life. But most of the population finds itself hemmed in sexually. Nearly every relationship is monitored by neighbors and subject to fevered interpretation. Getting away from prying eyes is so difficult that at nightfall parks fill up with courting pairs, and adventurous lovers couple on the ground.

Outside the cities, sex involves greater risk. In some rural areas, if a single man walks a single woman to her door, the stroll is equivalent to a declaration of marriage. The misreading of a relationship by neighbors or an accusation can bring social ruin. As in most other countries, the woman bears the brunt of the blame for sexual misconduct, though that may slowly be changing. One weekly managed to be both antisex and antisexist when it wrote that "virginity education should be carried out with females and males at the same time. A girl and a boy who have illegal sex should both face social accusation." Such accusation may have drastic implications; China's legal system lumps almost all sex crimes under the category of rape, which carries severe penalties, including long imprisonment or death in cases of serious injury or homicide. The possibility of a rape charge can haunt almost any male in China. Many of the rapes recounted in Girls, Be Vigilant! and in the daily press are either seductions or panicky charges leveled by young girls. Normally, consensual-sex "rape" results in prison terms of three to five years.

Despite the chilling effect of law and custom, liberal ideas and practices surface and are customarily blamed on the West. To many Chinese, Westerners seem enslaved by their animal instincts and unconcerned about family unity. Still, more open attitudes seem to continue. The usually stern Shanghai Liberation Daily raised eyebrows last summer with an evenhanded treatment of the loss of virginity, calling it "not a good thing, but it is not necessarily an irredeemably bad thing." And like other countries, China is learning that courses and books aimed at keeping the lid on sexual activity help feed it. Young women are now reading Girls, Be Vigilant! for tips on the erotic life.

With reporting by Richard Hornik/Peking