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Roughly five years following the inauguration of China’s economic reform and “opening to the West,” scholarly treatments of sexuality in China began to appear. The 1980s saw the conducting of public seminars and conferences on sexuality and contemporary sexual problems as well as publication of a number of academic journals. By 1990, there were a number of centers for sex research in Shanghai, Shaoguan, Shenzhen, Beijing, and Heilongjiang. This scientific pursuit of sexual knowledge and sexual practice paralleled the liberalization of Chinese social life and the marked increase in sexual expression. This chapter is but an excerpt of a much larger English translation of a national survey that represents the first attempt to study the most private, personal, and individual aspect of people’s lives in contemporary China: their sexual behavior. Often compared to the Kinsey reports of U.S. sexual behavior in the 1940s and 1950s, China’s “Sex Civilization Survey,” as it is known, has been revolutionary and pioneering in the Chinese context. Designed and administered by a team of sociologists, physicians, sexologists , and other practitioners of health-related and political fields in Shanghai, the survey (conducted from February 1989 to April 1990) sought to establish some general knowledge of the prevalence of premarital and extramarital sexual relations, homosexual relations, sources of information about sexuality, satisfaction with sexual practices, and so forth. Twenty-one thousand five hundred questionnaires were distributed by 538 fieldworkers in twenty-eight regions located in fifteen of China’s thirty-one provinces. Ultimately, 19,559 of the surveys were returned (94.4 percent): 6,092 from high school students, 3,360 from college students, 7,971 from married couples, and 2,136 from sex offenders. Although the number of respondents was large, the survey was drawn from a nonrandom sample, and, as sampling errors could not be eliminated , the findings reflected the habits of willing, cooperative respondents and were, thus, not generalizable to the entire population. Although the findings did not yield many surprises, they present researchers with a baseline from which to proceed. This information is essential for carrying out birth planning and for preventing the further spread of HIV/AIDS, a considerable national threat now that the government has acknowledged that there are 221 DALIN LIU, MAN LUN NG, LI PING ZHOU, AND ERWIN J. HAEBERLE TRANSLATED BY MAN LUN NG AND ERWIN J. HAEBERLE 11 Sexual Behavior in Modern China 600,000 cases nationwide. (Chinese medical experts in the field confess that the number is closer to 2 million.) The authors of the survey also provide a fascinating glimpse into a society that has had a reputation for prudishness and repression for most of the second half of this century. With an eye on comparison, they find that, in many areas, sexual behavior in China is similar to that in many other societies—yet with expected culturally shaped differences as well. They also examine differences within Chinese society, especially in terms of city and country, male and female, more and less educated. They provide their findings as a baseline from which future work on this heretofore controversial topic may proceed. It is important to note that the survey or poll is an uncommon information -gathering mechanism in China and that complete candor when responding is unlikely to be obtained. Moreover, considering the rapid pace of social change in China, especially in the areas of premarital sex, prostitution, and masturbation, the figures from this survey, now ten years old, must be regarded as a mere glimpse of changing practice. Nevertheless, the trends are manifest here as well as in the admissions of public-health officials and Party members concerning the exponential increase in prostitution (the World Health Organization, among other organizations, estimates the number of prostitutes in Beijing alone to surpass 300,000) and the increasing incidence of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. It is not prurience that drives us—or, for that matter, the researchers in China—to disclose these practices. Instead, it is our belief that the documented changes in this most private of activities convey a great deal about the changing experience of Chinese men and women. There is an urgent need for sex education in China; this survey aims at improving society’s understanding of sexuality as a healthy expression of personhood. At the same time as it discloses a startling array of sexual interests and practices, the survey gently but persuasively gestures toward the moralistic interdiction of sexual license common to Party pronouncements. In addition to...

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