Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (review)

Opening Up is a marvelous book. Readers who are familiar with changes in Chinese youth culture since the early 1990s will not find much in the book that is very surprising. But Farrer offers a systematic and comprehensive account of the changing culture of sex in a Chinese city and does so with theoretical sophistication and personal sensitivity. He also casts the study in a conceptual framework of modernity that endows it with significance beyond what he has to report with respect to Shanghai and the People's Republic of China.

The author states his aims to be, "first, [to] use Shanghai as a case to conceptualize sexual culture not as a narrow set of socially constructed acts, but as a broad symbolic field of stories, performances, and metaphors in which conventionalized actors, scenes, instrumentalities, and metaphors are as important as the acts. Second, [to] use Shanghai as a case for conceptualizing cultural change, in particular how sexual culture is transformed during the transition to a market economy" (5-6). The study owes the most theoretically to Kenneth Burke's writings on "symbolic action," especially his analysis of rhetoric, its contexts, and its agencies.

Farrer draws both on written work and extensive interviews to describe the changing scene and culture of sex among Shanghai youth (mostly from the late teens to thirty-somethings). His discussion of periodical literature on sexuality and lifestyles in general provides a good sense of official and semiofficial messages to youth and how these have changed since the late 1980s while retaining the didacticism of an earlier period. His own research obviously required a good bit (roughly two years) of hanging out at the new nightclub scene in Shanghai as observer and interviewer as well as (as he hints at one point) participant. These are supplemented by focus group discussions on matters sexual with the help of colleagues from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Farrer himself confesses his preference for qualitative over quantitative evidence, which may raise eyebrows among some of his sociologist peers but seems perfectly plausible to this reviewer, especially given his quite convincing grasp of his material and his authority over it. He is interested above all in the activities of his subjects and the stories they tell themselves about those activities, which may not tell us what proportion of the population in Shanghai, let alone the People's Republic of China, shares in his account of changing sexualities but does tell us a great deal about the new intellectual and emotional forces at work in Chinese society and how people caught up in those changes cope with them. The book is as much about coping as it is about liberation, perhaps more of the former than of the latter. The author is also sensitive throughout to the ways in which social differences (of both the class and the gender variety) enter the making of different experiences of sexuality.

The book is organized around themes or "scenes" (the "ecology" of sex), "true stories" (from periodicals), dating, making love, and feelings about a variety of matters sexual, including questions of sexual intercourse and virginity. Farrer demonstrates for all of these questions the changes that have taken place since the 1980s, changes that have divided generations from one another. At the same time, he is sensitive to the sedimentations of the past, to the ways in which the mores of pre-Socialist China as well as the legacies of Socialism persist in the present, making for complex attitudes toward sexuality that are hidden from view in celebratory accounts of sexual liberation in post-Socialist China. This is where the question of sexuality becomes entangled in the contradictions of Chinese modernity.

The study is more successful in the first of the author's goals (his account of sexual...