Straight Talk on Sex in China

By Sandra Burton/Shanghai, with reporting by Meg Maggio/Beijing

The Chinese may still be repressed politically, but their sexual behavior has undergone a sweeping liberation. The past decade of economic and social reform spawned a new permissiveness that was not suppressed by the soldiers sent to occupy Tiananmen Square. For the first time, Chinese sociologists have conducted extensive surveys to document the spread of the sexual revolution in the world's most populous nation. Their main conclusions: like most other populations, the Chinese are having more sex outside marriage and are becoming increasingly adventurous in the ways they make love.

By far the largest study is the Shanghai Sex Sociological Research Center's National Sex Civilization Survey. Using 500 volunteer social workers, the center obtained responses from 23,000 people in 15 provinces to a 240-question survey. The project is the Chinese equivalent of Alfred Kinsey's landmark studies of sexual behavior in the U.S. Liu Dalin, the study's director and China's best-known sexologist, agreed to discuss his findings with TIME before they are published. Results from a smaller survey of 1,279 men and women in 41 cities, conducted by sociologist Pan Suiming of the People's University of China, were recently presented at a World Health Organization conference.

The most striking trend found in Liu's study is the deterioration of the strong tie between sex and marriage. In the past, young girls were forced into arranged marriages shortly after puberty. Now women are forbidden by law, largely as a means of population control, to marry before the age of 20, and men cannot take a bride until they are at least 22. But relatively few are waiting that long to have sex. Fully 86% of those who answered Liu's survey said they approved of premarital sex. Such liberal attitudes often persist after marriage as well. A surprising 69% of the people surveyed saw nothing wrong with extramarital affairs.

Predictably, out-of-wedlock pregnancies are on the rise. In response, the government has taken a practical, if not exactly approving, stance toward the problem. Only a few years ago, unmarried pregnant women were fired from their jobs and forced to have publicized abortions. Now they are allowed to get abortions confidentially.

Many Chinese seem to be rediscovering the joys of sex annotated by their ancestors more than 370 years ago in the banned Ming dynasty erotic classic The Golden Lotus. Liu found that 60% of married couples in cities like to have sex in a variety of positions. Pan's survey indicated that nearly seven out of ten Chinese have had anal sex with heterosexual partners. Neither survey explored the extent of homosexuality, which is still taboo in China but not uncommon.

As in many other cultures, men often get more satisfaction from sex than women do, especially in rural areas. In Liu's survey, 34% of the couples living in the countryside (as opposed to 17% in the cities) said they engaged in less than a minute of foreplay or none at all. Partly as a result, 37% of the rural wives reported having pain during intercourse. Observes Liu: "The males are so rude as to give their partners no time to warm up." Pan found that men reached orgasm about 70% of the time, in contrast to 40% for women.

China is only beginning to discover the downside of the sexual revolution. AIDS infections, though still much rarer than in the U.S., are spreading rapidly, as are other sexually transmitted diseases. Along with promiscuity, prostitution is on the increase. By pretending such problems do not exist, the government perpetuates misinformation and ignorance. Liu hopes his study, which will be published in book form next year, will help give the Chinese people the information they need to make sex safer and even more pleasurable.