Chinese sexual attitudes

'If I like a guy enough, I'll sleep with him' by Esther Addley:

Catherine Liu is 28 and a little nervous, she says, because two weeks ago she split up with her boyfriend and it is making her twitchy about her prospects. "In England, it is OK until 35 not to be married?" she asks, slightly awed. "In China, it is only until 30." Then, a little forlornly, "My mother is worried about me."

Catherine is a Shanghai success story - well educated, sophisticated, with a high-profile job for a British company that has given her opportunities to travel the world. She is also unsettlingly fluent in the language that every woman of a certain age who wants to be married prefers not to utter aloud: how she is getting older every year, how she saves a sum each month towards an imagined future with an imagined husband, how she is looking for a guy who understands her, but who also has a solid career and promising earning potential.

Emphasis mine. Unsettlingly fluent? The reporter just isn't used to Chinese frankness on marriage.

She liked her boyfriend, she says, but he wasn't quite up to the mark. And so she is glad that during their four-year relationship, although they travelled together and frequently shared a hotel room, they never slept with each other. Dating, she says, means "kissing and hugging", nothing more. "My parents always told me not to have sex before marrying," she explains, "but I am sure some women do." And she tells me the story of a woman she knows who did indeed sleep with her boyfriend. Their families didn't even mind.

There is also her cousin, who is 22 and has just graduated. "She is dating a married man from her company. She says, 'I know he is 40 and will never marry me, but for the moment, it is so good.' I feel like I am standing on the edge of something. China is not like it was before. People have their own thinking. Sometimes even I am confused about the way the younger generations are thinking."

Chan Li, at 23, is only five years younger than Catherine but a social chasm separates them. She is dating an American guy who was her French teacher. Li, who likes to use the Japanese name Miki, works in marketing for Disney Asia, is conspicuously financially independent and is absolutely the master of her dating transactions. She chose a foreign man, she says, "because he thinks like me, and doesn't try to control me".

I tentatively ask Miki about the nature of her relationship with her boyfriend; she juts out her chin as if insulted that it should be questioned. "Of course if I like a guy enough I'll sleep with him!" Her four girlfriends, all aged between 22 and 25, noisily agree. Solvent, attractive and intimidatingly confident, none of these women admits to any enormous desire to get married or, if they did, to have their allotted child. "I will get married if I find a guy I really love," says Miki. "Or if I don't - why get married?" She'll think about having a child, "if I have enough money". For a moment it is hard to imagine a young woman anywhere in the world more assured of her own sexual power.

Last month, in a poll of 200 students from Fujian province in the south-east, 92% of the respondents said they thought that premarital sex was acceptable. Virginity was not listed among the top 20 factors - including personality, appearance and income potential - that the students said they looked for in a partner. That is remarkable if you consider this: in 1990, just 14 years ago, a study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that 80% of Shanghai residents believed that a woman's chastity was more important than her life.

If China's economic and social development in the past decade has been remarkable, the revolution in sexual mores that is taking place among sections of its society is simply dazzling. A 2003 survey found that nearly 70% of young Chinese were not virgins when they married; only 15 years earlier, that figure was 16%. (Even homosexuality - removed in April 2001 from the register of psychiatric disorders - has become almost acceptable; Shanghai now has a flourishing, if discreet, gay scene. "They don't even close the bars down the way they used to," notes one gay man wryly.)

A society that, perhaps more than any other in history, has been obsessed with regulating sex and its reproductive consequences now finds itself having created the conditions in which for many, actually doing it, whenever and with whomever, has become acceptable. But if sexual liberation has hit Shanghai with something of a bump, its impact is restricted to a tightly limited demographic, leaving those on the outside not a little bewildered.

...Concern about Aids is finally activating China's public-health authorities - the UN has predicted that the country could have 10m Aids cases by 2010 - resulting in a belated push on education about safe sex, and the beginnings of a programme to distribute condoms.

But the unintended consequence of such huge-scale social engineering will be to give sexually active young people even greater sexual independence. The great irony of China's strictly controlled social programmes is that in Shanghai at least, they have created a subculture that has found the space to be remarkably socially liberated. A generation of girls, for instance, has grown up remarkably relaxed about abortion due to its widespread use in population control.

I wonder about the reliability of those stats. Then again, it's interesting that the author of the Guardian article sides with many socially conservative Americans who assume that more sex education leads to more sexual activity, when the reverse seems to be true.