Sex, Culture and Modernity in China

7. Epilogue: The Regulation of Sexuality in the People's Republic

7 EPILOGUE: THE REGULATION OF SEXUALITY IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC Republican China was a crucial period of change during which modernizing elites increasingly referred to human biology instead of imperial cosmology as an epistemological foundation for social order. As in other secular nations, imagined or real biological differences were essentialized in the construction of categories like 'race', 'woman' and 'youth'; social groups were equated with biological units, the presumed biological endowments of human beings were given primacy, and cultural variety was thought to reflect more profound differences in nature. The construction of sexuality as a biological drive which formed the very core of the individual led to the emergence of a wide range of identities like the menstruating girl, the hysterical housewife, the menopausal harpy, the masturbating adolescent and the syphilitic husband. Moreover, the naturalization of desire introduced a polarity between a relatively autonomous individual, based on the idea of self-discipline, and the coercive intervention of civil society, justified in the name of the collective health of future generations . Sexual discourses constructed a conceptual link between individual, conjugal couple, population and state in which the discipline of the individual founded the power of the state. Finally, sexual desire, represented as a natural drive for heterogenital intercourse, was seen as a mechanism intended to ensure the reproduction of the species only: medical discourses drew a line between procreative and nonprocreative acts. Sex, in other words, was never dissociated from procreation. The emergence and articulation of a biologizing approach in early Republican China, intimately linked to specific modes of power and knowledge, was to a great extent the result of the introduction of new discursive repertoires from modernizing nations. However, it is hypothesized that the discursive forma180 EPILOGUE: THE REGULATION OF SEXUALITY 181 tions which were shaped in this period were also the outcome of a number of. cultural reorientations which may have taken place as long before as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead of describing the rise of normative naturalism as a derivative discourse from 'the West', this book recognizes that the roots of modernizing representations may have to be sought in a rich and diverse past in China itself. The structures of meaning shaped through discourses on sex before 1949 were located in a burgeoning civil society in Republican China. The most important development after the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party was the dissemination of these discursive formations to other levels of culture. In Republican China, some philanthropic institutions were established and forms of discipline appeared to shape the sexuality of the poor, but it was only under socialist rule after 1949 that public policies were inaugurated to deal with the sexual practices of the less privileged strata of society. The institutionalization of discourses on sex through official publications has been analyzed in detail by Harriet Evans.! Promoting the structure, repertoire and boundaries of Republican discursive formations, official propagandists in the CCP added little to an approach which emphasized discipline and restraint. The official socialist discourse constructed sexuality as an area of state control, and premarital or extramarital sexual practices like adultery, masturbation and homosexuality were declared to be 'shameless' or 'abnormal'. Through official publications the state attempted to regulate sexuality and establish mechanisms of control in the interests of marital and social welfare. By identifying sexuality as a domain for intervention, it expanded the available possibilities for direct interference into gender and family relationships . In its representation of gender distinctions, which were seen as biologically determined structures, official discourse 1 Harriet Evans, 'The official construction of female sexuality and gender in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1959', Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1991. 182 EPILOGUE: THE REGULATION OF SEXUALITY continued to give women a clearly subordinate role in the service of male-associated interests. The discursive link established between individual sexuality and state power was even more evident through narratives of self-abuse. In a public speech about the evil consequences for Chinese adolescents of bad habits, Huang Shuze observed: 'Young friends, I say that the force to overcome this kind of bad habit exists. Where is this force? This force is in our state's concern for the physical health of youth; it is in the responsibility you should have for the state and for the cause of socialism; it is in the socialist education you have received; it is in your...