What would Chairman Mao say? The supposed aim of “Midnight Whispers” is to help strengthen Chinese marriages. But Mao’s government regarded the masses’ libidos as a major threat to the party’s central authority. As soon as he took power in 1949, his troops went to work shutting down the country’s brothels. That was just the beginning. In subsequent years some communes kept residents in sexually segregated barracks regardless of their marital status. Married couples were allowed 30-minute conjugal visits once a week. The party outlawed pornography and cracked down on “immodest” clothing, enforcing a fashion for sexless quilted suits. During the Cultural Revolution the party, which in 1950 had outlawed the ancient custom of arranged marriage, introduced its own brand of shotgun weddings. In the name of stamping out the class system, local committees chose peasant brides and grooms for old-fashioned intellectuals and other “bad elements” suspected of “bourgeois tendencies.” The peasants were expected to correct their mates’ political “errors.” Sex was merely a biological process; in the socialist utopia promised by Mao, neither carnal lust nor romantic love existed.
China is rediscovering both forms of passion–and then some. The airwaves buzz with shows like “Midnight Whispers.” “The Bridges of Madison County” is a best seller. The state-run newspapers still print dutiful recitations of the party line, but now the propaganda is seasoned with articles bearing headlines like ORGASM: DIFFERENT TYPES. At Beijing’s Capital Airport, the snack counter offers an array of love oils, vibrators and specialty condoms among the candy bars and chewing gum. In the countryside, most towns larger than villages now have at least one disco where singles can pair off and a karaoke bar for commercial sex. Unmarried couples are renting apartments together, unhindered by the once dreaded watchdogs of the “neighborhood committees.” Police have mostly stopped harassing homosexuals on the streets; rumors say the Ministry of Public Security circulated an internal advisory several years ago instructing local departments to lay off. Law enforcers in China these days have more urgent obligations to perform than serving as chaperons.
Yet China’s sexual revolution isn’t all hugs and kisses. The divorce rate hasn’t hit Western levels yet, but social scientists say it’s rising fast. The Marriage and Family Affairs Institute in Beijing says the divorce rate in the capital is close to 25 percent, and family experts quote similar figures for most other major cities. Judging from the few official abortion statistics publicly available, the incidence of unmarried pregnancy is also soaring. According to one government study in Shanghai during the late 1980s, single women in that city underwent a quarter of all abortions. A more recent survey puts Beijing’s rate at one in three. Prostitutes have begun openly seeking business almost everywhere. And medical experts are warning that the country appears to be barreling toward an AIDS crisis of devastating magnitude (following story).
Mao himself was in no position to preach the virtue of chastity. Recent memoirs, widely circulated in China although officially banned, have portrayed him as maintaining his own harem of nubile peasant girls until his death in 1976. Few Chinese readers seem very shocked by the chairman’s fondness for concubines, an ancient tradition among the country’s leaders. The prudery of Mao’s social policies owed a larger debt to the Victorian notions of the Marxist philosopher Friedrich Engels than to anything Confucius ever said. In the centuries before the communists took over, Chinese writers and painters created a rich culture of erotica. Now, with Marx and Engels dead and buried again at last, China’s sexual attitudes are quickly reverting to the permissive standards of precommunist life.
Beijing inadvertently began speeding the change even before it embraced the free market. In 1979 Beijing introduced its one-child policy, a crash population-control program that had the revolutionary side effect of demystifying the sex act. Birth-control information, along with IUDs, condoms and the pill, became available for the first time throughout China. Educators introduced sex to the school curriculum in 1985. “Some teachers tore out the naked pictures before distributing textbooks,” recalls Zhang Zhigang, a member of Shanghai’s Municipal Education Commission. Most high schools strictly enforce rules against on-campus kissing and hand-holding. Such enforcement used to be unnecessary. That kind of behavior was not only forbidden but unthinkable. But the kids are getting valuable information. One Shanghai woman was recently alarmed to find strange stains on her 12-year-old son’s bedclothes. She hauled him to a neighborhood clinic and described the problem to a doctor. “Wet dreams are normal!” the embarrassed boy shouted. “They told us that at school!”
Even in college, premarital sex remains rare. Surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the students on many campuses are still virgins. Students typically live six to a room, and the penalty for getting caught can be probation or even expulsion. After graduation, though, social scientists say more than half of all urban singles become sexually active. The logistics are still difficult; most unmarried adults live with their parents. But the kids find ways, borrowing apartments from friends or scheduling their trysts for when Mom and Dad are at work. Last summer a foreign-owned telecommunications firm in Shanghai organized an overnight cruise for local employees, families and friends. Most single staff members brought dates– and then skipped every group event. “They stayed in their cabins the whole time,” grins one foreign-born manager. “When you walked down the hall you could hear what they were doing.”
Most gays in China don’t dare to be so public about their affairs. But that’s changing, too. Last spring Wan Yanhai, a prominent public-health expert and founder of China’s first AIDS Hotline, came out as a bisexual in an essay in the Shanghai Health News. “I felt I was hiding part of my life,” Wan told NEWSWEEK. “Now I’ve exorcized my demons.” Shanghai’s propaganda bosses denounced him, but he continues to work unhindered. His outspokenness has given courage to the many gay activist groups that have sprung up in Beijing and elsewhere.
Women who work as prostitutes scarcely bother hiding their activities. Four-star resorts routinely offer male guests VIP massages with “extra service”–sex with moonlighting chambermaids and waitresses. Most main highways are dotted with motels where truckers can find a hot meal, a cot and paid companionship. Some specialists work the movie houses, where $12 or so buys a little petting and a chance to negotiate a price for other services after the show. On the beaches of Hainan island, “swimming escorts” charge modest sums for a bit of flirtation in the waves, with additional fees for accompanying the girl back to her room. At the very top of the profession are the women who serve as paid mistresses to the business elite. In Shenzhen, the booming industrial center near Hong Kong, entire modern subdivisions have sprung up, called “concubine villages,” to house the mistresses of well-heeled businessmen in the crown colony.
Amid the explosion of sex, matrimony itself is taking a pounding. Kids look at their parents and think love and marriage are mutually exclusive; “my parents never hold hands,” a Beijing woman laughs. Many parents secretly agree. “The Besieged Fortress,” a novel by the popular 1940s writer Qian Zhongshu, has had five printings since Beijing lifted its ban on the book in 1980. “Marriage is a fortress besieged,” says its most quoted line. “Outsiders want to get in. Insiders want to escape.” Restless husbands and wives in Shanghai often look for love in ballroom dance halls. More than 100 such establishments dot the city. “People say they dance for their health,” says James Farrer, a Fulbright scholar studying courtship in China. “But it’s always married people without their spouses.”
China’s social engineers are doing their best to patch things up. In Mao’s day the party paid lip service to the family’s key role in maintaining social order, even during the depths of the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, many state policies were direct assaults on the family’s foundations. Children were encouraged to denounce their parents for “bourgeois tendencies”; married couples were shipped off to work in separate provinces. These days party leaders know they simply don’t have enough resources to take over the family’s traditional functions. Instead, officials are trying to rehabilitate the idea of marriage. They produce newspaper advice columns, self-help books with titles like “Between Husband and Wife” and “Talks on Sexual Barriers”–and popular radio shows like “Midnight Whispers.”
Dr. Chen, the show’s cohost, describes himself as a “cross-century engineer.” At his day job he serves as director of the Shanghai Male Sexual Function Rehabilitation Center. The clinic treats men who suffer from impotence or premature ejaculation, using sexual exercise machines to keep them in a steady state of unsatisfied arousal during daily half-hour sessions. “My wife heard about this place on the radio and kept hounding me to come here,” says a retired schoolteacher. Before he began treatment, he says, he had intercourse with his wife only four times a year. “Now,” he says proudly, “I do my duty once a week.” Chen says he’s serving his country. “Putting sex in the proper perspective will build strong families for the next millennium.” He doesn’t appear to be joking.
