Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China

By Y. Yvon Wang

Reinventing Licentiousness navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic—a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime.

Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives—ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures—to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world.

Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed "proper" sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501752988

Y. Yvon Wang

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett is a writer living in New Hampshire. She worked as a journalist for more than thirty years in New England and the Pacific Northwest.

Book preview

REINVENTING LICENTIOUSNESS

PORNOGRAPHY AND MODERN CHINA

Y. YVON WANG

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To all the missing masturbators

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Terms, Units, and Illustrations

Introduction

1. Challenging Yin Hierarchy

PARTONE: A GLOBALIZINGMARKETTRANSFORMSSEXUALREPRESENTATIONS

2. Commodifying Licentiousness in a Time of Flux

3. The Implied Masturbator Speaks

PARTTWO: GLOBALMODERNPORNOGRAPHYRAISESREACTIONS ANDCONTRADICTIONS

4. Sex(ology) Sells

5.Plus c’est la même chose

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It feels surreal to be writing these acknowledgments after reading them in other people’s books for so long. What those authors don’t always mention is how scary drafting such a document is: there is such a large number of people who have helped me during the years of researching, writing, and revising this book that I am already haunted by thoughts of whom I might be forgetting to thank before I even begin.

With the caveat that this is bound to be an imperfect roster of my debts, I must start with my gratitude to the incredible teachers I have had. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Sue Naquin’s tough love and Janet Chen’s generosity made me realize that I, too, could try doing this for a living. I was beyond lucky to be guided by Matt Sommer at Stanford, where he set me on this quest for the history of Chinese pornography by coming up with the snappy phrase "yin Beijing" (and where he taught me much through his example about how to be a better scholar, mentor, and person). Tom Mullaney’s insight and creativity were truly inspirational for this project. Kären Wigen and Haiyan Lee have been unstinting in both their support and their critiques, even years after I left Palo Alto’s quiet groves.

At Stanford, I found a family among my Chinese history comrades. Gina Anne Tam, Alex Statman (honorary Sinologist), Philip Thai, Wes Chaney, Josh Brett, Jon Felt, Andrew Elmore, Koji Hirata, Meiyu Hsieh, and Quinn Javers have truly been, like siblings, dear as my hands and feet. They’ve never gone easy on me intellectually and have never turned away in a moment of need. Beyond the China hands, Hannah Marcus, Catherine Chou, Annelise Heinz, Maki Dobczansky, Anna Whittington, Sayoko Sakakibara, and Brian Kim taught and continue teaching me new ways to think and to spit-take with laughter. Fellow students and faculty who attended my presentations at the Gender History Workshop allowed me a chance to air my (in retrospect, extremely) fledgling ideas. James Gerien-Chen, Victor Seow, and Maggie Greene have been treasured confidants and meme-swappers from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Nate Cira walked with me through valleys that felt like they could not be any darker and celebrated with me on sun-strewn peaks.

My colleagues in Toronto have given Canada and its five solid months of serious winter the warmth of home. They’ve cheered on this project even when I had very little cheer about its future, and I’m not sure I can ever fully pay back the innumerable favors they’ve done me of reading drafts, making much-needed suggestions, and offering equally needed reassurance (plus much more than their share of delicious meals). Tong Lam and Li Chen have demonstrated via their own work the breadth and innovation possible in our shared field. My classmates on the tenure track, especially Lucho van Isschot, Laurie Bertram, Brian Gettler, Anup Grewal, Tamara Walker, Cindy Ewing, Shana Ye, and Yurou Zhong, have all been indulgent listeners and astute advisors; Alison Smith, Nhung Tuyet Tran, Doris Bergen, Carol Chin, Lynne Viola, Tak Fujitani, Nick Terpstra, and Yiching Wu welcomed me to the brave new world of professoring and have been superlative advocates and guides, within and outside the history department. The conveners and attendees of the department’s writing group, the Critical China Studies workshop, and the Historical Studies of East Asia colloquium have all had a part in stimulating my thinking, as have the thoughtful, inquisitive students I’ve had the privilege of teaching.

Many organizations and individuals made the completion of this book possible. Grants from the Whiting Foundation, the Stanford Center for East Asian Studies, the Freeman Spongli Institute for International Studies, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Connaught Fund, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council allowed me to travel to Asia, visit archives, and accumulate a hoard of books that, if I am being completely honest, I would need to become a vampire to finally finish reading. I was honored to be a visiting student at the Institute of Modern History at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, where Huang Ko-wu, Sean Lei, Yu Chien-ming, Marlon Zhu, and Jen-der Lee sympathetically supplied my harried self with research leads and thought-provoking questions. Peggy Wu, always above and beyond, hosted me in a beautiful apartment and received overdue archival reproductions on my behalf. Andrea Goldman, Dongfang Shao, David Chang, and Deng Jianpeng helped link me to an amazing network of scholars based in both the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong, among whom Mao Liping, Lu Yingkun, Ding Rui, Guo Xiaoling, and Sun Yanjing assisted me with access to archives, introduced me to other colleagues, and fought with me over dinner bills. For long months during which the Air Quality Index in Beijing routinely soared to crazy bad levels, Emily Baum put up with me in our small shared apartment—sorry again for those disastrous soups.

I am grateful for the professionalism of the staff at the First and Second Historical Archives of China, the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Academia Sinica libraries and archives, the Academia Historica, the National Library of China (particularly Deputy Head Chen Li), the Shanghai Library, the National Central Library in Taipei, the Hong Kong Public Records Office, the University Services Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong University libraries.

Conveners of the 2013 and 2015 Association of Asian Studies conferences, the 2014 Historicizing Masculinities colloquium at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Big Berks gathering in 2014; the Harvard-Yenching Institute workshop Pornographic Modes of Expression in Early Modern China; the University of Toronto Bonham Centre Sexology/Philology workshop in 2016; and the 2016 University of San Francisco Constructing Masculinities in Asia conference all gave me opportunities to not only present my work but also to meet and enjoy exhilarating conversations with a wide range of scholars. As organizers who generously included me in these gatherings or chairs who lent my work their time and acumen, I especially wish to thank Kathryn Norberg, Melissa Dale, Wu Cuncun, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Durba Mitra, Ruth Rogaski, Andrea Goldman, and Leon Rocha.

Andrea and Leon number among those to whom I accrued further debts as I began piecing together the book. These kind souls, including also Gail Hershatter, Julia Andrews, William Ma, Jane Zheng, Daisy Hui, Michael Chang, and Bruce Rusk, read the untidy manuscript in part or whole, helped me track down elusive images and their sources, offered expert counsel, and saved me from some embarrassing errors. Li Desheng generously sent me beautiful reproductions of titillating cigarette package inserts he’d gathered over many years, and Gretchen Liu staggered me by supplying a rare photo of students from the Shanghai Academy of Art in her family’s collection. My appreciation to the staff at the Waseda University Library’s Furyo Bunko and the University of California at Berkeley Libraries for allowing me to use images from their collection.

The patience, skill, and sheer kindness that Emily Andrew of Cornell University Press showed this work and its author can’t be overstated. She and Alexis Siemon have been invaluable during the publication process. Warm thanks are due to Kathryn Bernhardt, who helped this flailing newbie publish parts of chapters 2–4 in Modern China. Though the feedback from my anonymous reviewers was not always easy to swallow, I am obliged to them for engaging deeply with my work as it evolved, and for pushing me to untangle my ideas. David Cohen has been a warm friend and a tough editor; his manuscript whispering pulled me through the most challenging parts of molding a messy dissertation into a vaguely book-like object. Thanks are due, too, to Emily Wilcox as well as Mariya Maistrovskaya and the TSpace and digital exhibits staff at the University of Toronto Libraries, who helped me find an online home for images and a Chinese glossary that will help readers make sense of the narrative.

A decade will have passed between the day I first set off to the Beijing archives and the day this book emerges in print. These have been years crowded with events both jubilant and shattering. My quest would never have been completed had I not had the friends, teachers, mentors and guides already named to aid and sometimes upbraid me. On top of their faith and support, precious almost beyond words, has been the unabating love of each of my parents, uncles and aunts, and grandparents, who have always believed in me more than I believe in myself. I guess they were right that I could, in fact, memorize the ABCs, though that once seemed pretty unlikely to me, six years old and fresh off the plane at JFK. Sorry I didn’t become a hotshot lawyer, though. Thank you to Rae, Khloe, Helen, Jerry, Mike, Anna, and Bella for keeping your big sib and cuz au courant and humble with your wisecracks, your insulting memes, your video game skillz, your badminton prowess, your high fives, and your baby drool. And to Nainai, Laoye, and most of all Justin: each of you should’ve been able to hold a copy of this book in your hands (and then joke about how only I could put down this many words about something so weird). I miss you.

Life beyond the office, classroom, and archive has held me together in body and spirit: the 519, the Distress Centre, and Kenya Thompson-Leonardelli helped heal wounds I did not even realize I was carrying. Friends well met through the Sierra Club, I.N.C.H., and the Toronto Outdoor Club, especially Sarah Zalusky-Zimmer and Xander Naryan, anchored me through sleet and snow. Simone Srinivasan picks me up, holds me close, and gives me the deep peace of being known.

This book, like this list, is incomplete, but it is in a way the product of the time, care, and allyship of each person who has made it possible, named here and not, and I thank every one of them with all of my heart.

NOTE ON TERMS, UNITS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Ages

Customarily, Chinese babies are one sui old upon birth and gain another sui per Lunar New Year. Thus, a girl of four sui might be as young as two years old if reckoned by the Gregorian calendar. Because it is difficult to be certain of which system was being used in any particular instance during this period, ages in my sources are taken as given.

Currency

The proliferation of poorly regulated currencies and widely differing regional practices and vocabularies for money plague attempts at reckoning prices in the late Qing and early Republic.¹ In Beijing circulated old Qing silver taels valued by weight, Mexican silver dollars, Chinese-minted silver coins, various denominations of copper coins, and paper bills. Exchanges between these systems tended to fluctuate daily. For simplicity’s sake, I will follow the system below when comparing prices, though it is far from precise. For example, though from 1905–1907 the following rates seem to have held true, by 1926–1930 the ratio had changed by as much as a factor of three—that is, each silver dollar converted to 300 copper cents. To make matters more complex, though police records generally use the official terminology for Chinese silver dollars (yinyuan) and copper cents (tongyuan), people of all classes used a huge assortment of slang terms, which pepper testimonies and other sources. References to dollars and cents in the text are to Chinese currency unless otherwise noted.

1000 (Qing standard) or 100 (customary practice in the 1910s) imperial copper cash (wen) =

50 Xianfeng-era emergency cash (tongqian, jingqian, tongzi’r, dazi) =

10 copper cents (tongbi, dan tongyuan, dangshi, daqian, mei) =

5 big copper cents (tongbi, da tongyuan, dang ershi, datongzi, datongzi’r, damei) =

1 diao or strand =

1 silver dime (yinjiao) =

0.10 tael (yinliang) =

0.10 yuan or silver dollar (yinyuan, yuan, dayang)

Measures

Chinese units like the cun, chi, and jin were roughly equivalent to imperial inches, feet, and pounds. However, one li is only about one-third of an imperial mile; in the text, a mile refers to the latter.

Chinese Terms

A glossary of Chinese characters for key terms and names in the text is online via the University of Toronto Library’s TSpace Repository here: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/98020. I have omitted names that have no historical significance beyond this text as well as well-known personal and place names that can be easily found in standard references. Also, I have used traditional or simplified Chinese script depending on the chronological context in which the phrase appears.

Illustrations

Please note that all images are available for online viewing via the University of Toronto Library’s TSpace repository. Three figures (A, B, and C) are exclusively viewable online. Permanent links are provided in the text.

Introduction

A Chinese History of Pornographic Modernity

In the wintry chill of December 1918, Beijing police officers raided the Expansive Gathering Book Society, a bookstall in the newly built Dong’an Market. There they found and confiscated a book using scientific-sounding language to discuss sex, Essentials of Hygiene for the Sexes (Nannü weisheng xuzhi); thirteen photographs (zhaopian)—which the police recorder called licentious pictures (yinhua)—and a copy of the Unofficial History of the Embroidered Couch (Xiuta yeshi), an infamously explicit novel from the early seventeenth century.¹

As spring shifted to summer in 1926, Zhang Jingsheng, a young French-trained philosophy professor at Peking University, China’s premier institution of higher education, published a slim book he called Sex Histories, Volume One (Xing shi diyi ji). Its seven first-person narratives of sexual awakenings, extramarital relationships, and patronizing sex workers garnered him immediate infamy as Dr. Sexology; he left his teaching position and founded a publishing house in Shanghai. Just three years later, with his business bankrupt, his academic career extinguished, and countless counterfeit sequels to Sex Histories in circulation, Zhang retreated to his southern birthplace and spent the rest of his life in obscurity.

One day in the sultry late summer of 1934, police confiscated large quantities of nude photograph candies (luoti xiangpian tangguo) from sweet shops across Beijing, which had been renamed Beiping. These small hard candies had been double-wrapped with tiny photographs enclosed by a piece of brightly colored paper, and could be had for a fraction of the cost to buy or rent a photograph at the Expansive Gathering Book Society. By the time the police found what the confections contained in the hands of one unlucky peddler, he claimed that the workshop producing them had already sold out.²

Why did the policemen see sexual hygiene and seventeenth-century novels as both so illicit that they warranted immediate confiscation? Zhang had apparently published his book in pursuit of plaudits as an innovative recorder of human sexuality, but why had his venture ended in failure? Given that Beijing police had already been rounding up licentious photographs in 1918, why were they still circulating, in even cheaper forms, a decade and a half later? And what was it about items they trafficked that united the bookseller, the professor, and the candy peddler in the eyes of legal and cultural authorities? What did police even mean by licentiousness? What was the effect of prosecuting people for dealing in it?

This book seeks answers to these questions. In it, I document the shaping power of everyday economic markets on cultural politics. Specifically, I examine how sellers, producers, and consumers of sexual representations like the people in these three examples shifted the boundaries of what counts as erotically transgressive: in other words, which kinds of depictions of sexuality should be condemned and controlled. I posit that, about a century ago, China and many other societies around the world entered a new and ongoing pornographic stage in the history of such boundary drawing. In China, this phase built on but is distinct from an earlier vocabulary of licentiousness.

Global modern pornography has both material and ideological dimensions. I draw on one main set of sources to highlight the former: the Beijing Municipal Police Archives from the early years of the Chinese Republic (1912–1949). These archives contain many examples like the moments above that indicate a tight symbiosis among form, content, and legitimacy. The presence of photographs in both the 1918 bookstall and the 1934 candy wrappers—in the latter case depicting female nudes—reflected the rise of visuality and naked bodies in sexual representations, a focus that distinguishes the pornography of the most recent century from its predecessors. Books like Sex Histories, printed via modern lithography and letterpress, demonstrated how new technologies carried new ideas about sexual science that were ascendant in Europe, Japan, and North America, alongside a range of other new fields of study that recorded, normed, and categorized human bodies and psyches.

But, as in the case of the fallen professor, my sources also show that China’s centuries-old erotic media markets could turn even supposedly modern, revolutionary sexual science into a prurient commodity while undermining the authority of the most impeccably credentialed intellectual leaders. From a Chinese empirical basis, I argue that key early twentieth-century changes in conceptions of eroticism around the world were at least as rooted in the activities of historically anonymous people making, selling, and buying depictions of desire and sexuality as they were generated by intellectual discourse, elite cultural production, and state initiatives around sexuality and media. The social and intellectual history of how material objects, circulated by relatively anonymous individuals, changed the cultural politics of eroticism is also my entry in continuing theoretical debates around sex, media, markets, and cultural power around the world.

In this introduction, I lay out the questions animating my research, explain some key concepts that I will use to bring together a diverse body of sources, survey the existing studies on which this book builds to highlight my interventions in multiple scholarly conversations, and present an overview of the book’s architecture.

Initial Questions, Sources, Setting

My first goal in investigating licentiousness is simple. Existing scholarship on erotic media, whether in early modern France, seventeenth-century China, or the contemporary United States, has focused on the contents and the authors of such media. I became curious about what kinds of media ordinary people of the past regarded as transgressive, how they managed to obtain that media, and how they justified their access. Did a day laborer have to forego supper to buy himself a book that the police would have confiscated as illicit?

In the course of researching this book, I consulted nearly eight hundred police cases from the first year of the Chinese Republic through the end of the 1930s in the Beijing Municipal Archives that gave me a basis for answering these questions. My working definitions of illicit sexual representations are based on what I have found in these files or comparable ones from the late imperial period, because it is pornography as designated by law enforcement that ultimately had the greatest impact on the lives of everyday people. What ordinary consumers, sellers, and producers of sexual depictions considered pornographic in turn shaped what the police saw as transgressive; thus, the prosecution of licentiousness and pornography by regulators created its own object. This is why some of the materials I discuss below may seem disparate and not especially titillating to twenty-first-century readers. Their diversity underscores that interactions between law enforcement and markets on the individual, quotidian level reflected and reshaped shifting parameters of legitimacy.

The earliest version of Beijing’s modern police appeared as temporary peacekeepers during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, in which a mass uprising against foreign presence resulted in American, European, and Japanese troops occupying the Qing (1644–1912) imperial capital. In the fall of 1905, authority over law enforcement in Beijing was for the first time invested in an independent chain of command under the Police Board (Xunjing bu). Modeled after contemporary Japanese and European systems, the board set the standard for law enforcement across China. As Tong Lam points out, modern Chinese policing was intended to resist Japanese and Euro-American colonial projects but simultaneously borrowed their authoritarian tools for domestic redeployment.³ By the 1910s, the capital was finely divided into districts and beats; patrolmen were so ubiquitous a presence in the streets that American sociologist Sidney Gamble dubbed Beijing one of the best-policed cities of the Orient.⁴

Files of the Qing policing institutions and the various police bureaus that succeeded them include everything from arrest records of a few lines to investigations spanning months. Though the city’s policing was thoroughly systematic on paper, the political flux of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the fact that the capital’s law enforcement was tasked with a prodigious assortment of duties, from peacekeeping to census taking, made realizing an ideal vision of social order monumentally difficult. Moreover, most Beijing police officers were barely better off than the socioeconomically marginal people they most commonly prosecuted.⁵ In a sample of cases from 1914 to 1926 with information for thirty-three officers, nine identified as Bannermen,⁶ twenty-eight were under thirty-five, and virtually all hailed from the city or its immediate hinterlands. The base pay for a patrolman was only six dollars per month from 1906 to 1918. By contrast, a typical unskilled laborer made seven dollars a month in 1908 and an upper-middle-class Beijing household in 1918 paid servants about three dollars monthly, with room and board included.⁷ In 1919, one ex-policeman claimed to have gone so completely bankrupt that he had to beg his mother for cash and winter clothing.⁸ Others took up lowly sidelines like selling tickets for opera performances to make ends meet during their time on the force.⁹

A particularly key element of police records are the biographical data and first-person testimonies from suspects and witnesses who otherwise had few opportunities to leave historical traces. A case typically resulted from the fortuitous discovery of someone with an offending item in hand, and subsequent interrogations usually involved questions about the age, native place, Beijing address, and livelihood of the detainee. The police nearly always asked about the provenance of the offending goods—how many copies did the suspect have? Where had they been printed or bought?

Police cases thus supply insight into the attitudes and actions of ordinary people on both sides of the law and are central to my argument that grassroots continuities were key to the transition between licentiousness and pornography. Moreover, the Beijing files are among the most complete and accessible that I know of in China. Cases about ground-level pornographic markets are much thinner in Shanghai’s archives and cluster in the 1930s and 1940s; they are even scarcer in the city archives of Tianjin and Guangzhou.

My cases also present numerous obstacles. Most were terse and sometimes inscribed with the phrase of secondary importance (ciyao) because there were simply insufficient police resources to plug the dike of control over the capital’s markets for sexual representations. It can therefore be difficult to judge if a testimonial narrative is mere boilerplate, the reflexive response of a frightened individual, or reflective of lived circumstances.¹⁰ A complete, pure vision of reality cannot be reassembled from the records of police notetakers. Testimonies might have been given under intense physical or psychological duress, and files may have undergone multiple levels of bureaucratic filtration, beginning with the first word put down by an official recorder. Though the questioning almost certainly occurred as a dialogue, the vast majority of testimonies omitted the interrogators’ voices altogether, leaving readers to guess at the questions—and the motivations behind them.

Given the humble backgrounds of patrolmen and the unstable sociopolitical milieu, it is unsurprising that records displayed frequent inconsistencies. Names were often garbled, due partly to witnesses’ lack of literacy as well as the profusion of Chinese homophones; ages and previous arrest records were similarly riddled with disparities. In addition to hasty police record-keeping, the sheer ephemerality of cheap books and images, piracy, and shoddy printing—not to mention the concealment of explicit materials in museum and library catalogs and collections—combine to make most of the items listed in cases untraceable today. Finally, the powerful and wealthy more easily avoided prosecution, and few elites entered the legal record at all.

Because the police records are incomplete, even distorting, I also deploy a range of other materials. Some of them have not yet been used to discuss the topics at hand, while others remain almost unknown in Anglophone scholarship: late Qing Beijing police files from the First National Archives,¹¹ a hand-inscribed commentary on a nineteenth-century edition of a sixteenth-century novel held at the National Library of China, originals of early Republican pamphlets containing lyrics to explicit ditties, the diaries of a late Qing literatus, and a mid-1920s survey of over three hundred readers of a left-leaning, Beijing-based journal.

As for my concentration on Beijing itself, this choice too presents both advantages and limitations. There are obvious drawbacks to focusing on a single city, and an exceptional one at that. Turn-of-the-century Beijing had been the seat of imperial power since 1421 and remained the national capital through the tumult of revolution and civil war, until 1928. Foreign troops only made a violent debut in the city in the 1860s, almost twenty years after the first treaty ports were opened following the British defeat of the Qing in the First Opium War. From the seventeenth century on, poetry, travelogues, and guidebooks carried by expansive woodblock printing technology had made Beijing the vessel of a positive, transcendent, and enduring antiquity.¹² In an age of dislocation and apparent decay three hundred years later, there was a sense that Beijing was uniquely and especially traditional. Its unique demography mixed Han and Bannermen, princes and paupers, middle-class students at modern schools, modern industrial workers, as well as impoverished sojourners and refugees hoping for a steady living. Hence, Beijing has not been associated strongly with modernity thus far in the cultural, intellectual, and social history of turn-of-the-century China, unlike Shanghai and other treaty ports.

But, precisely because of its close association with antiquity, Beijing makes my story about Chinese modernity and tradition more complex. Beijing illuminates the processes of interaction—not simple imposition or replacement—that are central to my narrative. Its expansive recycling economy centered on a middle- and lowbrow marketplace bridging grand new ideas and the necessities of people’s daily lives,¹³ and its status as ancient cultural capital (wenhua gudu) entwined the cultural economy of the Ming and Qing with that of the twentieth century. For these reasons, some of the apparent limitations of Beijing as focus are also what makes the city relevant to my history of licentiousness and pornography. Next, I define these central terms as they are used in this book and explain how my exploration of them builds on and departs from existing research.

Sex and Legitimacy in China

Using the kind of street-level narratives I described above, I pursue two goals in this book. First, I intend to explore pornography as an example of how cultural politics work, showing where the line between illicit and legitimate gets drawn by whom, how, and why, as well as how these boundaries changes over time. Second, and just as importantly, I intend to emphasize how material realities, such as print technology, control over the human reproduction, and the need to feed oneself and one’s family when self-sufficiency was no longer possible and the market became the apparent sole recourse, have impacted cultural politics and the range of possible self-conceptions open to individuals. Specifically, I posit that pornography is not only a tangible commodity, but also a historically specific configuration of power, desire, and representation. As such, pornography has both reflected and shaped broader historical processes of global scope. In particular, the emergence of pornographic media commodities has been pivotal to the formation of a modern subject defined by natural universal sexuality and desire.

However, regimes of regulating and understanding desire evolve slowly and fitfully. Thus, unlike most of the work thus far on sex and sexual representations in China, this book takes a longer view. I bring together two sets of empirical contributions from existing scholarship: those focusing on twentieth-century transformations in Chinese sexual culture and those studying a range of materials documenting sexual feelings, actions, and norms dating back to at least two centuries before the Common Era.¹⁴ My rationale for this longue dureé span is simple: archival records like that of the 1918 bookstall raid that turned up seventeenth-century novels alongside sexological-sounding manuals make it clear that the changes of the early twentieth century and the containment efforts it sparked must be understood against the technological, commercial, and ideological developments of the late imperial era. Important continuities existed in the materials that were seen by legal authorities and ordinary buyers and sellers as transgressive.

Additionally, accounts of modern Chinese history almost take for granted the magnitude of change that gripped China during the century from the British defeat of the Qing in 1842 to the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Enlisting sexual representations to take a longer view adds to the ongoing scholarly reconsideration of the litany of wars, treaties, and regime changes to which this period of crucial transition is easily reduced. Transformations whose effects became unmistakable by the 1930s are illegible without the complex context of earlier stages. The sexological tracts and tabloids of the Nanjing Decade (1928–1938) were rooted in new ideas, technologies, and institutions in China that had been developing since the late nineteenth century. Among these novelties was the vision of China as a unified, trans-historical nation, superseding the older model of a dynastic imperial state.¹⁵

At this point, the reader might be objecting—rightfully—that the Chinese language does not contain the word pornography. Indeed, contemporary Chinese translates the word in several ways: the academic seqing combines se, color, a character long freighted with implications of lust and seduction, and qing, sentiment or emotion. Huangse, yellow, is more widely used in everyday contexts, especially in Mainland China, where it appears as a juridical term, too. Legal texts also often use yinhui, licentious and filthy. Before the twentieth century, the character yin in this compound was the most common way to mark a sexual representation as transgressive.¹⁶

Significantly, yin could apply to all heterodox things, people, and practices, not just those involving sex. It denoted any natural act or phenomenon that, by its excess, went beyond the pale, as we will see in chapter 1, which describes pre-twentieth-century sexual discourses and representations. Dutch diplomat and Sinologist Robert van Gulik broke ground in Anglophone scholarship with his mid-twentieth-century surveys of imperial Chinese ideas about sex based on bedchamber manuals containing elements from as early as the 300s BCE. In more recent years, researchers have closely scrutinized imperial-era fiction, medical texts, brothel guides, and legal records.¹⁷ These materials have enabled cultural historians to describe the elite male connoisseurship of actors; social historians to investigate the material logics of family formations outside the ideal of adult virilocal marriage; and medical historians to disinter empirically rooted, philosophically elaborated models of sex and reproduction.¹⁸

From these accounts, it is clear that while the physiological experiences of desire and sexual pleasure in China before the twentieth century were probably not unique, they were conceived of and represented in ways that differed significantly from other periods of history and from other parts of the world.¹⁹ Crucially, ideas about sex in China were highly secular. Buddhism, which prescribed celibacy for clerics and recommended sexual abstention for lay devotees, had spread widely from the 200s CE. But, after the medieval period, Buddhist sexual renunciation became not only an infrequently chosen path, but also one routinely cast under suspicion in popular culture and the eyes of the law.²⁰ Sexual legitimacy instead centered on reproduction as a contribution to family and state—providing descendants for the patriline and taxpaying labor for the ruler. Even apparently esoteric discourse that spoke of balancing cosmic energies and achieving longevity through intercourse was solidly this-worldly—concerned more with mortal existence than eschatology and highly hierarchical in focusing on the patriarch’s longevity and heirs.²¹ Also distinctive was China’s long lineage of representational technologies; writing and printed texts made early appearances as handmaidens of worldly power, and some of the oldest surviving Chinese texts speak directly of sexual desire. The transposition of some of these texts into oral and performative genres meant that by the late Ming (c. 1572–1644) China had a deep substrate of representations expressing a sexual culture shared to a surprising degree among rulers and commoners, literati and illiterates.

A large proportion of scholarship on sexuality in Chinese history clusters around this late Ming period, drawing principally upon literary works—the commodified products of a woodblock revolution in print technology. As scholars have forcefully argued, print goods, whether produced by woodblock or moveable type, marked a new, early modern age in world history.²² Woodblocks, in addition to urbanization, the elaboration and expansion of markets, and the decline of hereditary legal statuses, allowed a growing range of Chinese consumers to arouse and satisfy their desires with mass-produced, mass-circulated representations of sex. Print—in both words and images—is my focus in this book because, for the temporal span I cover, print is what has survived as the trace of experiences, fleeting or frequent, that have otherwise passed from knowability.

Print was also the main focus of attempts to regulate sexual representations and prosecute their creators and consumers. The woodblock led to a feeling that established configurations of power and pleasures were slipping out of alignment, as relatively nonelite consumers, even some women, could access the same materials that their betters had long enjoyed. Late Ming thought leaders reacted to this sense that unqualified consumers of titillating material were growing more dangerous but also more difficult to keep at bay by deploying containment strategies, especially sex- and class-based denigration.²³ Nonetheless, the expanded access to sexual representations enabled by markets and print technology chipped away at attempts to maintain hierarchies of cultural politics.

Then, in the tumultuous years between approximately 1880 to 1930, as the Qing Empire gave way to a politically unstable but at least nominally representative republican government, more fundamental challenges arose to the hierarchies underwriting long-standing ideas about whose desires counted as proper and whose did not.²⁴ Still newer technologies and global markets for information, layered atop their predecessors, more thoroughly broke down the authority of political and intellectual elites over the parameters of erotic transgressiveness.

Two technologies in particular contributed to these changes from the mid-nineteenth century onward. First, the quantitative acceleration of commodified media technology, especially via the photograph and lithograph, effected qualitative transformations in sexual representations. These changes were most significant in visual culture, shaping a global convergence toward the naturalistic female nude as the ultimate turn-on. Print media, in alliance with capitalistic economies of global scale, opened new avenues to control pleasures as well as to contest that control. Second, reliable and accessible birth control produced on industrial scales began allowing sexual pleasure to be increasingly separated from reproduction. Contraception catalyzed radical changes not just in discourse about sex and sexual difference, but also in the physical ways that each individual experienced them.²⁵ A fuller command over reproductive functions was particularly key to eroding the male monopoly over desire.

Desire came to define one’s identity and connection to a universal human nature.²⁶ Thus, the desiring subjectivity of women and others formerly excluded from such positions was now unprecedentedly recognized, even celebrated. What is more, desiring individuals in China were at the turn of the century shifting from imperial subjects to becoming citizens of a