In Communist China, recreational sex was once seen as a bourgeois evil and husbands and wives were encouraged to live apart. Now, the country is undergoing a sexual revolution that amazes even Western visitors, writes Miriam Donohue
Beijing, 11 p.m. on a Thursday night. Scantily dressed young women and men, clad in tight leathers, gyrate to the throbbing beat of Western dance music. On a leopard-skin couch in one corner of this heaving nightclub, a couple of revellers are busy fondling each other.
Outside, it is below freezing, but inside the Banana Club in Beijing's Chaoyang district, the temperatures are soaring. This is the hottest spot in town. "I was there one Saturday night recently and saw a couple having sex on the floor," says Don, one Western regular. "I was shocked. I would expect to find that in a disco in London or New York, but certainly not in Beijing."
There are plenty more places like the Banana Club in the Chinese capital where inhibitions are cast off and sexual expression rules. In "The Den", in South Bar Street, young Chinese nightly strut their stuff, and little is left to the imagination.
"This is a great pick-up bar for guys like me," says Wang, after taking a slug of his beer in the packed, smoky room. "There are always girls hanging around looking for a good time."
Around the corner in another well-known local hostelry, heavily made-up prostitutes brazenly eye up Western customers. This is a popular place with tourists and visiting business people looking for a good time.
China is going through a late sexual revolution, but it is fast catching up with the rest of the world.
From the 1950s to the early 1980s the Communist Party branded recreational sex a decadent "bourgeois evil". This was an extreme reaction to what had gone on before 1949, when prostitution was rife and places like Shanghai, dubbed the "whore of the Orient", boasted 30,000 ladies of the night. Most Chinese men held at least one and often many concubines, and infidelity and promiscuity were widespread.
For the first three decades of Communist rule, men and women wore drab, identical, loose-fitting Mao suits. Some communes required husbands and wives to live separately, and films depicted couples embracing the Communist revolution rather than each other.
Sex was taboo, an act cloaked in secrecy and shame. Basic sex education was abolished and a whole generation of Chinese was left ignorant and embarrassed. Prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases virtually disappeared.
But China's economic opening up over the past 20 years has been accompanied by sexual liberation. It is hard these days not to notice sex in China. Young people wear body-hugging outfits, sex shops are sprouting up in every city across this vast country of 1.2 billion people, late-night radio phone-ins discuss sex in detail, and couples are no longer afraid to hold hands and kiss in public.
The revolution is also evident on the newsstands. Today, if a magazine doesn't have sex, it won't sell. Advertising companies use pretty women and handsome men to market their products. The traditional state newspapers are losing circulation to racier tabloids, which carry less serious news and more titillation.
There is a photographic studio in a central Beijing shopping mall that advertises nude portraits. Business is also good at the Adult Sex Shop near the China World Trade Centre. It sits comfortably beside office buildings and a sandwich bar. Its shelves are stocked with condoms, vibrators, aphrodisiacs and other sex aids. The shop assistant wears a white coat and offers a free consultation to customers. There are hundreds of these stores in Beijing and in cities all over China, with annual sales estimated at $100 million.
According to the assistant, customers range from 70 years down to 20, and most are men. Viagra is selling well. A black-market version, known as "Weige", is also available in Beijing.
Hardliners are unhappy with the changes in sexual attitudes and say China is descending into the moral pollution the Communist Party claims to have rescued it from in the 1950s. But most people welcome China's sexual coming of age. Even the attitude of the Communist Party leadership is changing. For example, last year it gave its blessing to the opening of the country's first sex museum in Shanghai by outspoken sexologist Liu Dalin.
The last five years have seen the most dramatic shift in attitudes to sex in China, according to Dr Pan Suiming, professor of sociology at Beijing's People's University.
"Before, sex was sex, and designed merely for procreation, while love was love and pure. But now, young people are putting the two together," says Suiming.
He says Western influence is only one reason for China's change in sexual attitudes; another is the Communist Party's loosening grip on hearts and minds.
"People are not controlled as tightly in their working units as before. Social contact is becoming more frequent and popular among young people as a result," he says.
Twenty years ago, the average age for Chinese people to have sexual intercourse for the first time was 25 years. Today, according to Dr Pan, it is 18.6 years of age for men, and 20 years of age for women. "But this figure is still high compared to Western countries," he adds.
Li Dihui (not her real name) is a social science student at Beijing's People's University and has a steady boyfriend she met on campus. Coy when asked about her attitude to sex, she estimates that one-third of students in her class are sexually active.
"It is certainly different than in my parents' time. And I think there are more pressures now, especially on girls to have sex with their boyfriends. I don't sleep around, but I know students who do," says Dihui.
She says it is easy to access the pill and condoms, although it is hard to come by information. "You have to go and seek it out. It is not something that you are taught."
The revival of promiscuity has brought with it new problems. Figures show that rates of sexually transmitted diseases are rising by between 20 and 30 per cent annually in China, a factor that is fuelling the HIV problem.
Official figures put the number of HIV- positive cases in China at 600,000, although international health agencies believe the real figure is twice as high. There are predictions that China will have as many as 10 million AIDS cases in the next decade. Despite the threat of an epidemic, and the existence of a rigid one-child birth control policy, China's conservative leadership still imposes a ban on condom advertising.
The state media is currently leading a campaign to have the 12-year-old ban lifted in the interests of both health and business competitiveness. The increase in sexually transmitted diseases is blamed on the low usage and poor quality of condoms.
Despite some progress in recent years, there is still widespread ignorance about the spread of AIDS. Last year, a survey by the state Family Planning Commission found that one in five people had never heard of the disease. And only half of those surveyed knew it could be transmitted by sex. This ignorance about the health aspects of sex is a chronic problem, especially in small cities and towns.
Zhang Wei (22) is planning to get married later this year. She says she has learned all she knows about sex from the Internet. "It is something that is not discussed among your girlfriends until after you marry. Then it is okay to speak to your mother or your friends about this subject - but not before. I do not plan to have sex until after I marry, but many of my friends are sleeping with their boyfriends," the college student says.
She also had to resort to the Internet to equip herself with knowledge on contraception. "In China a couple must register after they marry and only then are they given a book and a video about family planning and contraception. But that is far too late," says Wei. "This is something we should be taught in school."
ACCORDING to the Chinese ministry of education, there are attempts to fill the sex education vacuum. In China, about 20 million children reach puberty every year and comprehensive sex education courses are now being introduced in middle schools in 10 major Chinese cities, including Beijing.
Pu Wei, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says local governments are waking up to the fact that Chinese society is at a turning-point, with more pre-marital sex, accidental pregnancy, abortions and sexual diseases.
American sex therapist Dr Judy Kuriansky visited China three times last year and has published a book, Sex Questions of Chinese Men and Women. It contains answers to hundreds of questions asked on a pioneer hotline that operated last year in the Shanghai Centre for Reproductive Health Instruction.
Of the 42,000 calls, 8,000 were about sexual problems ranging from erection and ejaculation problems, to boredom with sex.
"The questions were surprisingly similar to the types of questions I get asked by American men and women," Dr Kuriansky said in a newspaper interview last November.
According to Dr Hu Xiaoyo of the centre, attitudes have undergone a dramatic change and people in China, just like people all over the world, now want better sex lives. Some of the old taboos are being swept aside. For example, masturbation is no longer regarded as something that amounts to "self-abuse" and is becoming more accepted, he says.
With each passing month, China's sexual straitjacket is being well and truly shed.
- Part 2 tomorrow
