Behind the Red Door

By Richard Burger

A sexual revolution is underway in China. Traditional morals and behavior are being turned on their head as the country's climb towards economic prosperity brings sex into the open. But it is a revolution distinctly different from the one experienced in the West, and has taken many unexpected twists and turns. Written in a highly engaging and re

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9789881616258

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Every year, thousands of Chinese women pay for an operation to restore their hymens shortly before their wedding so that husbands can see blood on the sheets on their honeymoon night. Brides-to-be who cannot afford the 4,400 yuan operation (about $700) can walk into one of China’s 200,000 sex shops or go online to buy a cheap artificial hymen that seeps artificial blood when punctured. Although the percentage of Chinese women who engage in premarital sex has skyrocketed in urban areas from 15 percent in 1990 to more than 50 percent in 2010, conservative attitudes toward sex, even in big cities like Shanghai, remain largely intact. To most Chinese people, virginity matters, and husbands look forward to their wedding night when they can deflower their young virgin brides. For some husbands, the absence of blood on the sheets can be grounds for divorce.

It has become a tired cliché that China is a land of contradictions, but it is only a cliché because there is so much truth to it. China’s ruling Communist Party oversees an economy that is in many ways aggressively capitalist, runs a socialist society filled with Western icons like McDonald’s, iPads and Mickey Mouse, has democracy with Chinese characteristics while regularly arresting human rights lawyers and a vigorous and lively Internet community that is just as vigorously censored and manipulated by the party’s propaganda arm. Corruption is both rigorously banned and blatantly everywhere. The contradictions related to sex in contemporary China are just as dramatic. Opposing forces always appear to be pulling at each other. Looking at a Chinese newspaper one day you might get the impression China is as sexually liberated as Sweden, and the next you might think China is actively engaged in sexual repression.

In 2009, authorities launched a 15-day crackdown on the huge prostitution business in the southern China manufacturing hub of Dongguan. Hundreds of arrested prostitutes were marched down the street tied to a leash, their photographs broadcasted throughout the country. Others sat on the sidewalk, their heads in their hands, weeping. The raids were major national news. And yet, any man in China seeking sex-for-sale can probably find it within walking distance, be it at a karaoke bar, barber shop or massage parlor. Most of the brothels busted in strike hard campaigns as in Dongguan are back in business a few weeks or even days later, though they may have changed their address.

There are now gay bars in most of China’s first and second-tier cities, and usually a bathhouse or two as well. In 2009 a gay male couple held a symbolic wedding a few blocks from Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and a photograph of the two men in a passionate embrace was splashed across the front page of China’s largest newspapers, all mouthpieces of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Other gay and lesbian marriages across the country followed, and were covered positively. But until relatively recently gay bars and establishments were frequently shut down with no notice. In 2009 police raided a popular gay park in Beijing and detained eighty men. A similar park in Guangzhou was raided three times the next year and a hundred men were also arrested. Bathhouses are frequently shut down during major national events such as the annual National People’s Congress or the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Weddings in China are nearly as sacred and revered an event today as they were in ancient times. While many of the rituals, such as being carried to the wedding ceremony in a sedan chair, have been updated, vestiges of traditions that date back two-thousand years remain intact, including the selection of an auspicious wedding date by a feng shui master and the bountiful all-night wedding feast with foods selected for their association with good luck. For most Chinese, even homosexuals, the very idea of not marrying is incomprehensible; a child’s primary obligation to their family is the provision of offspring within wedlock. But at the same time, divorce rates have soared in China since the 1990s, with infidelity being the most common reason for separation. Hundreds of thousands of wealthy Chinese men keep second wives (ernais), a throwback to the practice of concubinage, and millions of married Chinese men of all social strata pay for sex on a regular basis.

For most of the past 100 years, talking about sex in public in China has been taboo. Still, in 2004 a healthcare website distributed postcards that were displayed in bars and restaurants across the country telling men and women there was no problem with masturbation. The Chinese expression for autoeroticism is shooting planes, and the front of the postcard features a large anti-aircraft gun pointing at a plane in the sky. Directly above, the text reads: If you shoot planes too often, will your barrel get blocked? Flip to the other side, and it says, Of course not; both men and women can masturbate. It is normal and does no harm. Are the Chinese hyper-shy about sex or surprisingly liberal? As the expression goes: It’s complicated.

The story of sex in China, from thousands of years ago to today, is an astonishing one. No society has swung more dramatically from extreme sexual openness to prudish orthodoxy and then to the sexually ambiguous atmosphere we see at present. This transformation has gone back and forth many times, and there is no single clear trajectory leading from sexual openness to sexual repression and back to relative openness. Even within the same imperial dynasties, China’s attitudes toward sex kept shifting. And during some of the most sexually repressive periods, Chinese artists created some of the most sexually graphic art and literature. These contradictions have been there throughout China’s sexual history, and they are alive and well today.

There is no arguing that China is in the midst of a sexual revolution, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the start of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening up in the early 1980s. However, it did not really take off and become a true revolution until the 1990s. The initial opening only lifted the dark curtain of repressed sexual expression that fell over China from the Communist victory in 1949 through the late 1970s. It took several more years before sex education was introduced in China’s classrooms and many biology teachers today are still so squeamish on the subject that they skip it all together.

But the changes underway are palpable. Today in China’s cities you will see public displays of affection that would have been unthinkable as recently as ten years ago, let alone during the time of Mao. Young Chinese couples are holding hands, walking arm in arm, and they may even enjoy a brief kiss. But as is always the case when discussing sex in China, there are qualifiers. Public displays of affection are still rare in China’s smaller towns and villages, and even in the big international cities like Beijing and Shanghai many young couples refrain from touching one another. Still, the ice has certainly broken and more Chinese young people are rejecting the long-held tradition of keeping their affections to themselves outside of their homes.

China’s sexual revolution is real, but what kind of sexual revolution is it? It is tempting to look at China and conclude it is going through the same type of sexual revolution that swept the United States and much of Europe starting half a century ago. In the West, sexual expression was tightly repressed before and during the Victorian period, followed by a loosening up as people gained new political freedoms and societies liberalized. This process was a slow one, and it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that we saw the bubble burst, with young people suddenly doing their own thing and shedding many of the sexual inhibitions of their parents. Entertainment became increasingly risqué, and nudity and language that would have been considered obscene just a few years earlier became widely accepted. Coed dorms opened at universities, young people started having sex earlier, and erotica was everywhere. The door was opened for people in the West to express their sexuality as they saw fit. Openly gay bars proliferated after decades of operating in secret. Pornography and books that had been banned became available to anyone who wanted them. Sex clubs, mainly underground but well known to the public, became a regular feature of major Western cities, at least until the advent of AIDS in the 1980s. These changes were part of an overall movement of political and cultural liberalism, a willingness to challenge authority and traditional societal norms that suddenly seemed passé. It was a revolution fought on several fronts, and it swept through Europe and the United States at roughly the same time (although Europe tended to be more open-minded about sex earlier than the United States).

According to the popular narrative, China has generally followed this same course, the key difference being that it was a couple of generations late to the party. How tempting it is to chart China’s sexual revolution as if it paralleled that of the West. For the past thirty years, so the story goes, after a quarter century of a sexual blackout under Mao, the world was witnessing a long-overdue opening up of Chinese sexual freedom, growing in tandem with the economy and the slow but steady loosening of control over citizens’ private lives.

But was it really this simple? Matthew H. Sommer, in his book Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China cautions us: This ideal of erotic liberation has influenced some historical studies of sex in China, which seem to assume that the only important story is one of a struggle between individual freedom and narrow-minded repression. But China is not the West, where individual freedom has long been highly prized, and Sommer and other historians argue that such assumptions in regard to China are simplistic. Neither China’s creeping sexual repression under the Qing nor the country’s gradual unfolding of personal liberties in the late twentieth century follows the more linear model seen in the West.

To understand why China’s sexual revolution cannot so easily be explained by Western Enlightenment notions of ever-increasing freedoms and individual rights we need to briefly survey how China got to where it is today.

China was for many centuries a society of extraordinary sexual openness. More than two thousand years ago, Daoists were celebrating the performance of sex with as many young women as possible to extend the lives of male practitioners. Sexual intercourse was seen as fundamental for the sharing of Yin and Yang essence. Ancient sex manuals detailed techniques for bringing women to multiple orgasms in order to siphon off the female essence released by their vaginal secretions. Men of means kept concubines, and at times prostitutes were registered by the government. Emperors kept harems that numbered thousands of women, and more than a few kept young male lovers as well. Same-sex love was acceptable, as long as those who practiced it maintained their familial obligations.

While there was a loosening and tightening of these sexual norms at different points in China’s history, ancient China was in many ways one of the most sexually open societies the world has ever seen, particularly from the male perspective. The pendulum swung, unevenly, from unprecedented sexual liberalism under the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907) to repressive orthodoxy under the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1912), with lots of back and forths in between. Puritanism reached its peak in the Mao era, when prostitution was all but eradicated along with almost all public references to sex.

If by the late nineteenth century the sexual landscape had grown dim, after Mao took power in 1949 it soon went absolutely black. For many years, the slightest display of intimacy outside the home was taboo. Marriage was a monogamous relationship between one man and one woman. Premarital sex and homosexuality were strictly forbidden as the CCP wrapped its people in a cocoon of chastity. Men and women wore drab, gender-neutral clothing, and sexual desire was looked on as a selfish and bourgeois indulgence. To discuss anything about one’s personal life and romantic longings was unimaginable. Sex education in school was forbidden, as were all forms of erotica and sex-related books.

An interesting exception was the numerous research papers on sex that circulated among the highest party members in the 1950s. These reports indicate that while the government was intent on creating a society that was basically sexless outside of their homes, it was still concerned with keeping its citizenry sexually satisfied. Sexual contentment was seen as an important pacifier to keep the society stable and harmonious. Although the communist government distributed some pamphlets on the importance of a healthy sex life, they still stressed the importance of sex for the purpose of procreation. The pamphlets were only circulated in a few cities, however, and most Chinese never even saw them.

The stifling of sexual expression seemed to reach its apex during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao sent forth his Red Guards to destroy the four olds - Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas - and threw the country into a decade of chaos and terror. Sexual asceticism became the law of the land, and those who sought sexual pleasure outside of marriage faced brutal punishment. The editors of an exhaustive book on sex during the Cultural Revolution, Report on Love and Sex among China’s Sent-Down Youth, lamented, We were robbed of our youth, ideas, hopes, and love. In terms of love, people were criticized and struggled against, put in jail … All books about love were labeled pornographic, all songs about love labeled low-class. Men and women in love were considered hoodlums.

Gender differences were broken down as girls in Mao’s Red Guard wore their hair short and donned the same quasi-military uniforms as boys. Androgenized females were encouraged to be as brutal as their male comrades, and often led the charge beating suspected rightists with leather belts. Their role was to be devoted only to total and unending revolution and class struggle, undistracted by physical desires. One of their top priorities was to purge the country of pornography, considered the most dangerous import of spiritual pollution from the West. Dirty jokes and profanities were forbidden.

And yet there are more than a hundred memoirs from the period telling stories of the sexual urges and romantic yearnings of young male and female Red Guards, set free to roam the country under no parental supervision and frequently experimenting with sex. According to feminist studies professor Emily Honig, many female Red Guards were sexually molested by their male comrades. Many of Mao’s foot soldiers, male and female, were exposed for their sexual immorality and subjected to cruel interrogation sessions and beatings.

Girls in particular were vulnerable to scorn if caught having sex, and were paraded down the street with a pair of worn-out shoes tied around their neck, a metaphor for their being damaged goods. Despite the ban on sexual thought, young male Red Guards frequently exchanged handwritten pornographic books, and there are many recorded instances of male Red Guards molesting women as they terrorized the population. So to label the Cultural Revolution as a time of complete sexual austerity, despite its battle against sexual expression, is not entirely accurate. Experimental sex and private displays of affection may have been banned but they certainly did not cease to exist.

After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 life slowly returned to normal, and the reforms of Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, would soon loosen the Communist Party’s chokehold on sex. The 1980s saw the return of prostitution open the door to a new sexual chapter. As foreign businessmen flooded into China to seek their fortunes, a huge prostitution industry developed and thrived, despite occasional government crackdowns known as Sweeping the Yellow (yellow in Chinese stands for vice). The demand for prostitution increased as migrant laborers moved to the big cities to find work. China was slowly loosening the reins, recognizing the need for citizens to find sexual satisfaction. Censorship under Deng never stopped, and there were many violent crackdowns on vice and pornography, but Mao’s eradication of prostitution was over.

It was not until the 1990s, as the Communist Party continued to give citizens greater personal freedoms, that a truly visible sexual revolution swept the country. Homosexuality was decriminalized and gay bars began to sprout up in the international cities. Western influence was everywhere and attitudes toward sex began to change. But the tug of war between conservative values and China’s new-found sexual freedom was always pulling in opposite directions. Sweeping the Yellow campaigns continued and the government never ended its efforts to keep its sexual revolution in check. In 2010 there were a series of arrests targeting wife-swappers, and the war against pornography, especially in the age of the Internet, took on a new aggressiveness. The government would not stop interfering with people’s sex lives entirely. Any sexual revolution would be on its terms.

It needs to be remembered that for all its progress and modernization, China’s government remains an authoritarian one that does not hesitate to meddle in the lives of its citizens. That is not to say the leadership is homogeneous; some members of China’s huge Communist Party and government apparatus are pushing for greater social and political reforms, but the conservatives often seem to have a greater say.

Today, movies and books are still heavily censored or banned altogether for lewd content. The media report that an army of 30,000 censors watches over China’s Internet to protect the people from unsafe material, which is defined not only in terms of pornography and gambling but also in terms of comments, articles and websites that reflect negatively on the party and its leaders and question in some way the political status quo. Thousand of sites the censors deem harmful simply will not load in China. This includes many blogs, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. Social media can rally the masses, and what the Chinese Communist Party fears most is an uncontrolled assemblage of citizens, as it saw in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But at least in terms of sexual material, it appears to be a losing battle. Anyone in China with a Wi-Fi connection can download porn to their heart’s content, and anyone using a virtual private network can visit any of the banned sites. Millions do every day.

The decision by the government to allocate a high degree of social and sexual freedom to its citizens is an intentional and self-protective one. The government knows that when the people are prosperous, and when they feel they are free to do in their private lives as they choose, they will be less concerned with political matters and will be more willing to leave the government alone. This concept is not really anything new for China, where for thousands of years the average citizen played no role to speak of in the nation’s governance.

China’s leaders have decided they can allow people a considerable degree of personal latitude, as long as society accedes to the government’s claim to complete power. Democracy advocates in China, like Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, can still receive lengthy prison terms for urging Western-style political reform. References to democracy on Chinese microblogging and social networking sites are routinely censored (though this can be compared to a game of whack-a-mole). So far the strategy of increased personal freedom in exchange for limited political freedom has worked, despite occasional grumblings from netizens about censorship, corruption and social injustice. If these grumblings grow too loud, censors do all they can to squelch them.

In the book Sex and Sexuality in China, China scholar Elaine Jeffreys examines the argument that in China talking about sexuality may be neither inherently liberating, nor diametrically opposed to the interests of power, and that perhaps the recent proliferation of sex-related discourses in the PRC constitutes an extension rather than a curtailment of the CCP’s disciplinary power. She questions the narrative common in the Western media that China is on a steady path to Western-style sexual and political liberation.

Greater freedom, ironically, can mean greater control. Mao recognized this in 1950 when his government rewrote the marriage code to give women greater equality and the right to marry whomever they chose. The actual effect was to accelerate women’s entry into China’s workforce, one of the Party’s goals, and to weaken the male-dominated family structure, transferring power from the family to the state. Arranged marriages were banned (on paper) and young people were encouraged to choose their own spouse, though always with the active participation of their family. Divorce, while legal, remained impossible without official approval. Although divorce rates rapidly increased, it was still a difficult process and many thousands of requests were denied. Mao’s emancipation of women under the mantra Women hold up half the sky was an important landmark for women in China but many of the gains were theoretical. Post-Mao revisions of the marriage code, which continued into the twenty-first century, did eventually give the Chinese true freedom to marry and divorce as they wished.

An early sign of growing personal freedom was seen in the early 1990s with the advent of new radio programs featuring advice hotlines, such as the wildly popular call-in show Midnight Whispers, which started broadcasting in Shanghai in 1996. Citizens called to discuss previously taboo topics like extramarital affairs and unrequited love, and the programs enjoyed a huge listenership throughout much of China. People finally had an outlet to talk about sex without fear of being watched by the government or by their family. Both men and women participated, men usually seeking sexual advice, women more likely to discuss family and marital stability. This program