Male Same-Sex Relations in Modern China: Language, Media Representation, and Law, 1900–1949

In China during the first half of the twentieth century, the issue of male same-sex relations appeared in venues such as Peking Opera, literary works, sexological writings, and, most prominently, tabloid newspapers. In those various social locations, which were either new (sexology, tabloids) or in the process of being transformed (opera, literature), urban citizens argued about the importance of a modernized understanding of gender and sex in order to become a strong nation.

With an increasing number of works on women’s history in China, gender has proven to be an indispensable analytical category in the study of Chinese history, but masculinities and male same-sex relations are rarely addressed as a way of broadening our understanding of modern China. The limited studies of same-sex relations in twentieth-century China tend to focus on how Western sexology was viewed in China. For example, in Sex, Culture and Modernity in China, based on published sexual manuals, Frank Dikötter argues that the Chinese modernizing elites of the Republican period did not adopt the Western concept of sexuality and still understood “homosexuality” as “an acquired aberration or a temporary disease which should be eliminated,” and supported his argument with the fact that “the criminal code in China, to this day, does not have a specific law recognizing or prohibiting homosexuality.”¹ However, in The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, Tze-lan D. Sang contends that “the medicalization of same-sex relations that began during that period indeed represented a dramatic departure from late-imperial literary depiction of such relations in terms of vocabulary and truth claims.”² Both Dikötter and Sang rely on sexological writings of the early twentieth century, but the two scholars have reached very different conclusions. Sang’s argument might be valid for female same-sex desire, but not for male same-sex relations. The problem is that neither of the two scholars has taken into consideration the internal contradictions within the Chinese indigenous understanding of male same-sex relations as well as those within the Western modern homosexual/heterosexual definition.

In this essay, instead of asking the old question of whether acts became identities with the arrival of modern Western sexology in China in the early twentieth century, I will discuss the tension in the Chinese indigenous terminology for male same-sex relations, which was quite like what Eve Sedgwick describes about the Western modern homosexual/heterosexual definition. Rather than focusing on medical and sexological writing, I analyze major urban tabloid newspapers such as Shanghai’s Jingbao (晶报, Crystal) and Tianjin’s Tianfengbao (天风报, Heavenly Wind), as well as other journalistic writings and legal discourses. I argue that the Western sexological concept of homosexuality was accepted and incorporated in early-twentieth-century China because it was similar to the local understanding of male same-sex relations. I also demonstrate how new meanings were produced in the process of epistemological encounters under the historical context of semicolonial China. Finally, I answer the question of why the Republican state legal apparatus had no clear stipulations on sex between men.

Encounters between Indigenous Chinese Discourse and Modern Western Sexology

In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick points out that the modern Western homo/heterosexual definition is internally incoherent and mutually contradictory.³ On the one hand, homosexuality is defined as a special issue for a minority group of people, and on the other hand, it is assumed that homosexuality could happen to anyone. Additionally, homosexuals are considered to embody the essential position of their own gender, whereas on another parallel model, they are understood as gender transitive.⁴

Those tensions are also found in Chinese terminology for male same-sex relations. The term pi (癖, obsession), which was used to characterize men who enjoyed sex with other men, could also suggest a pathological mental state.⁵ The idea, on the one hand, implied that men who had this kind of obsession were a special type of person, and on the other hand, presumed that the obsession could happen to anyone. The Chinese term renyao (人妖, freak...