Sexuality In Contemporary Chinese Culture

Sexuality in Contemporary Chinese Culture
Lecture Given at the Conference on “1997: Building a Global Civil Society” June 4-7, 1997

Josephine Ho
Center for the Study of Sexualities National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan

It is certainly an odd experience to find among discussions of poverty, labor movement, democracy, identity, human rights, and spirituality, all serious soundingtopics, a special session on the taboo subject of sexuality. It is even stranger to see sexuality included in a conference on building the civil society, an endeavor usually associated with a clearly defined public realm run by individuals for whom sexuality, except in its most negative and criminal aspects, may be one of their least concerns. Yet, it is when we think of sexuality in relation to thehistorical condition of contemporary Chinese culture that the conspicuous and ubiquitous presence of sexuality becomes somewhat comprehensible.

Sexuality in Its Historical Presence
Perhaps we need to first ask: why the sudden concern with sexuality? What forces, historical as well as social, can we detect at work in the topical events that have helped promote sexuality to its present status ofemergency? And how have the discursive exchanges and contestations surrounding these events shaped our understanding and feelings toward sexuality? Several significant events in the 1990s highlight sexuality’s most recent dramatic emergence in the Chinese world: ---The Chinese translation of The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex (1990) sold more than 100,000 copies in the shrinking book marketof Taiwan in 1992, thus creating the most impressive but least expected sales figure for a rather conservative publishing house, which has obviously underestimated the public’s undeclared interest in the subject.1 The timely arrival and warm
1

The publishing house, which bears the Chinese name of “Teacher Zhang”(±i¦Ñ®v ), has since then been labeled by many critics as “Teacher Huang”(¶À¦Ñ®v ),hinting at its improper role in publishing “obscenities”¡]¶À¦â®Ñ¥Z¡^ --for in Taiwan’s strongly anti-sex culture, the mere mention of sex is considered obscene. The publishing house, with its English name proclaiming its belief in “Living Psychology,” has since then translated the works of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson as well as the Hite Report by Shere Hite, and sponsored quite afew studies of sexuality in the local

reception of the sex report signal that sexuality has developed such an undeniable visibility and evoked such a strong sense of anxiety that what we are witnessing in the sales is a craving for some direction and guidance, given in the credible and authoritative form of statistical or empirical studies, so as to facilitate the understanding and evaluation ofpersonal values and practices in the ever-expanding field of sexual matters. ---Perhaps as one mimicking response to the popularity of the Kinsey report and as one form of expression of the political concerns of the moment, an unprecedented mass survey of sexual life sponsored by a now defunct popular Taiwanese weekly(¤®É©P¥Z ) was conducted simultaneously in 1993 in more than a dozen communitiesin both Mainland China and Taiwan, purportedly revealing the dramatic changes and differences in sexual mores and practices, which may then serve the delicate purposes of determining the differing degrees of westernization/modernization in the two regions while at the same time ascertaining the commonalities among the Chinese in both regions.2 ---On Mainland China the sudden surge of publicationof several voluminous studies of the Chinese sexual culture, ancient and especially contemporary (including such works as ¼B¹FÁ{ ’s Contemporary Sexual Culture of China ¤ ¡m °ê·í¥N©Ê¤åÆ ¡n (1992)¡B¼ï¸k»Ê ’s The Presence of Sexuality in Contemporary China¡m ·í«e¤°êªº©Ê¦s¦b ¡n (1993) and Current Conditions of Sexuality in China¡m ¤°ê©Ê²{ª¬ ¡n (1995) ), provided narratives that congealed the...