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AcknowledgementsDiscussion of a potential volume on issues of sex and sexuality in the People’sRepublic of China began as a casual conversation between Gary Sigley andI regarding the general paucity of edited texts on the subject matter in English,and the need to involve Chinese-language contributors in a proposed volume,given the burgeoning nature of sexuality studies in mainland China and relativeignorance of those studies outside of a specialized China studies readership in theWest. We were both delighted by the enthusiasm this idea generated, and I wouldlike to thank all of the contributors for their willingness to be involved and theirdedication to the project. Special thanks are due to Pan Suiming and Li Yinhe,both of whom are scholars of considerable standing in China.I would also like to thank Sara Danru Zhang, from the Institute for InternationalStudies (IIS) at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), for invaluableresearch assistance and help with translating the Chinese-language contributionsby Li Yinhe, Pan Suiming and Zhang Heqing; Gary Sigley, from the Universityof Western Australia, for working on the initial translation of the chapter byLi Yinhe; Ivan Roberts, for proofreading various chapters and formatting thefigures and tables that appear in the contribution by Pan Suiming; Wayne Peake,the Research and Records Coordinator at the IIS, UTS, for proofreading the draftvolume; and UTS for research funding in 2003. Finally, I would like to thankProfessor David S.G. Goodman for his ongoing intellectual and collegial support.Sections of the chapter by Margaret Y.K. Woo were published in M.Y.K. Woo(2003) ‘Shaping citizenship: Chinese family law and women’, Yale Journal ofLaw and Feminism, 15: 75–110. The author and the publishers would like to thankYJLF for allowing us to reproduce those sections here.Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permissionto reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear fromany copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectifyany errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Introduction: talking sexand sexuality in ChinaElaine JeffreysIn an article entitled ‘Talking sex’, Dennis Altman (2000: 171–8) contends thatthe truly radical impetus of postcolonial and cultural studies lies in the attentionboth fields have shown towards issues of sex and sexuality. However, Altmanproceeds to qualify this claim by arguing that the problem with queer theory isthat it has failed to imagine itself outside of the ‘Iron Triangle’ of London,Paris and New York (ibid.: 176). The ‘development of genuinely new regimes ofsexuality and gender’, he continues, ‘seems more likely to emerge from Rio,Manila and Soweto than the hyper-academicised hothouses of western theory’(ibid.). The point to note, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2001: 669)explain, is that Western studies of sexuality have tended to replicate the tradition/modernity divide, by reifying Euramerica as the site of modern, progressivesocial movements, while other parts of the world are presumed to be traditionaland oppressive, especially with regards to sex and sexuality. Such studies havethus failed to consider how different nation-states, forms of governmentality,economic formations, and consumer cultures, produce and uphold diverse sexualsubjectivities and communities in an increasingly globalized world (ibid.: 663–79).The tendency of Western studies of sexuality to reify Euramerica as a unifiedsite of ‘modern freedoms’ owes much to the apparent and perceived lack of sexualrights in many developing countries. The NGOization of social movements – inthe form of ‘the emergence of global feminism as a policy and activist area’;struggles by gay, lesbian and other activists; and the imperatives of HIV/AIDSprevention programs – has seen the extension of Western liberal conceptions ofhuman rights to the rest of the world (ibid.: 665). Although some postcolonialtheorists have criticized the neo-colonialist implications of this particular form ofglobalization, for valorizing Western-style sexual liberation as the ‘only possibleprogressive trajectory’, and for constructing universal and potentially oppressiveFeminist and Gay subjects, such criticisms tend ultimately to be rejected on thegrounds that they sound too close to arguments against a universal respect forhuman rights, and therefore offer succour to traditional and repressive regimes(e.g. Altman 2000: 174).Queer theorists similarly wind up advocating the globalization of Euramericansexual politics, both because of and in spite of their Foucauldian allegiances.Conventional histories of sexuality posit a standard trajectory: an original period

2Elaine Jeffreysof ‘natural’ openness was followed by a chronicle of increasing repression thatculminated in the constraints of the puritanical Victorian era (where sex wasconfined to marriage for the purposes of procreation), constraints that we are onlynow beginning to throw off (Edelman 1994; Weeks 1985). Michel Foucault (1978)challenges this ‘repressive hypothesis’ by showing how the very ‘putting of sexinto discourse’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a proliferation ofsexual identities (albeit pathologized ones), and encouraged us to speak out aboutsexuality as both the truth of ourselves, and an act of courage against oppression.Hence gay, lesbian and queer theorists have variously illustrated how the institutionalization of heterosexuality functions to produce and marginalize ‘other sexualsubjects’, thereby prompting calls for liberal law reform to reject the ‘sex-negative’attitudes that underpin the legal regulation of so-called deviant sexual conduct(Hocquenghem 1993 [1972]; Rubin 1984: 3–31). An evident problem here isthat the continued appeal of queer theorists to notions of sex-negativity andthe transgressive nature of ‘doing the forbidden’ tends to reinstate the (mostunFoucauldian) repressive hypothesis. It implies that what mainstream societyperceives as perverse sexual acts, while not exactly referring to fixed or innatesexual identities, exist in a ‘natural’ state of opposition to the assumed repressiveand predatory aims of government (Jeffreys 2004: 81). Once activated in nonWestern contexts, this appeal inadvertently reinforces perceived differencesbetween policies based on traditional morality and the more enlightened policiesof ‘the West’.The tendency of Western studies of sexuality to present Euramerica as a unifiedsite of ‘modern freedoms’ is reiterated in popular commentaries on the emergenceof sex as a prominent feature of public life in the People’s Republic of China(PRC). Media reports with catchy titles, such as ‘Move over Mao, today’s Chineserevolution is sexual’ (Lynch 2003), routinely relate a narrative that celebratesChina’s belated entry on the Long March to global modernity, epitomized byWestern-style sexual and political liberation. According to this particular story,sex was open and free in traditional China, but all that stopped when theChinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949. Under the leadership ofChairman Mao Zedong (1949–1976), sex practically vanished from sight inChinese culture. The Communist regime enforced a ‘puritanical public moralitythat regarded individual desire as bourgeois indulgence’, with the result that menand women dressed in androgynous conformity, premarital sex was virtuallyunknown, and commercial sex was banned (ibid.; Wehrfritz 1996: 8). This situation changed with China’s opening to the West, following the introduction ofDeng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and Open Door Policy in December 1978.Now the Chinese too have Western-style dating, a commercial sex industry,radio call-in shows providing sexual advice, and a growing lesbian and gay scene;and, somewhat unfortunately, they are also experiencing some of the same problems as ‘us’ in that crimes such as rape are increasing and sexually transmissibleinfections (STIs) are spreading rapidly. But the most serious problem, or sopopular commentators aver, is that the conservative Chinese Party-state still hasto catch up with this positive new climate of sexual openness: just as it places

Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 3restrictions on political freedoms, so too it oppresses individual expressions ofsexual rights (Taylor 2004).Scholarly accounts of China’s legal reforms also imply that the PRC has yet tocatch up with an idealized conception of liberal post-modernity, epitomized inthis instance by the establishment of international markets and a rule of law(for criticisms of these accounts see Potter 2001: 1–3). In keeping with thenew governmental rationale of the reform era – the growing conviction that ‘themarket economy is a legal-system economy’ – the PRC promulgated its firstCriminal Law in January 1980 (Chen 1996: 4). During the Maoist period, theformal legal system fell into disrepute as a tool of class-based oppression and wasreplaced by the Chinese system of administrative and Party disciplinary sanctions(Starr 2001: 204–19). This latter system, under the auspices of the Chinese publicsecurity forces, was used to police the activities of those who were deemed tohave committed social offences or political ‘errors’, and has been condemned forencouraging arbitrary and extra-legal forms of punishment (ibid.; Bakken 2003:128–44). Thus China’s turn to a ‘modern rule of law’ is celebrated as a welcomeshift from the now denigrated ‘Maoist rule of man’. But the continued operationof the administrative system alongside the formal legal system in present-dayChina has also led to accusations that the Chinese Government is reluctant toaccord its citizens the rights that are presumed to follow the establishment of ruleof law and lead to the creation of a more democratic and equal society (ibid.).Thus, as with criticisms of the CCP’s response to China’s changing sexual culture,critics of China’s legal reforms similarly present the PRC as lagging behind themodern, developed West, and assume that the interests of the Chinese state andthe Chinese people are diametrically opposed (e.g. Link 2002).Recent research on the subject of sex in China questions the conventionalcontention that the act of ‘talking sex in the PRC’ is about testing political limits,and demanding Western-style legal reforms, by highlighting the dependence ofsuch analyses on an assumed opposition between the repressive puritanism of theMaoist era and the seeming liberalization of today (Hershatter 1996: 42–93).Whereas the expatriate scholar, Fangfu Ruan, implies that the greatest repressionof sex in world history occurred under the Maoist ‘Party-police-state’ (Ruan andBullough 1989: 201; Ruan 1991), other scholars proffer a more complicatedstory. Although critical of the gendered consequences of the CCP’s promotion ofmonogamous marital heterosexuality, Harriet Evans (1997) notes that an extensive discussion of sexual issues took place in official publications during the1950s and early 1960s. Gary Sigley (1998: 3–13) adds that this focus did notmean that sex was regarded as ‘unspeakable’ in puritanical fashion, since officialdiscourses paid considerable attention to the role of pleasure in harmonizingmarital and family relations. Moreover, contrary to standard claims that thecommunist repression of sex reached its zenith during the Cultural Revolution,Emily Honig (2003: 143–75) shows that many phenomena which are assumedto be ‘new’ to ‘Open-door China’ – homosexuality, premarital sex, extramaritalaffairs, pornographic literature, prostitution – also existed in the late Maoist period,even though their specific causes and forms were often quite different (ibid.: 171).

4Elaine JeffreysRecent research further challenges suggestions that China is undergoing asexual revolution because the historical links between sex and politics in thePRC have been severed. As Kathleen Erwin (2000) and Gail Hershatter (1996)variously explain, the emergence of new disciplines in reform-era China, such associology, sexology, social work, and law, and the spread of new technologies,in the form of call-in radio, telephone hotlines and internet chat-rooms, haveensured that public discussions of personal and sexual concerns are now moreextensive than at any point in the PRC’s history. This ‘openness’ is often readas a sign of the ‘Chinese people’s’ rejection of official state power and formerintrusion into the private life of individual citizens. However, both scholars warnthat the recent proliferation of discourses on sex and sexuality may not be intrinsically more liberating than the Maoist-imposed ‘silence’, since such discoursesare generally tied to government-led agendas designed to promote modernizationand social stability as the basis for prosperity, as well as to ensure the CCP’songoing political legitimacy (ibid.). They therefore co-opt Foucault’s innovativecontention that talking about sexuality may be neither inherently liberating, nordiametrically opposed to the interests of power, to imply that the recent proliferation of sex-related discourses in the PRC constitutes an extension rather thancurtailment of the CCP’s disciplinary power.This book contributes to the critical task of exploring issues of sex and sexualityin non-western contexts by examining debates surrounding the emergence of newsexual behaviours, and the appropriate nature of their regulation, in present-dayChina. Commissioned from Western and mainland Chinese scholars, the chaptersin this volume are marked by a diversity of subject material and theoreticalperspectives, but turn on three related concerns. First, the text is concerned tosituate China’s changing sexual culture, and the nature of its governance, in thesocio-political history of the PRC. Second, it shows how China’s shift to a rule oflaw has generated conflicting conceptions of citizenship and the associated rightsof individuals as sexual citizens. Finally, the text demonstrates that governmentalauthorities in China do not operate strictly to repress ‘sex’; they also are implicated in the creation of new spaces for sexual entrepreneurship, expertise andconsumption.In examining these themes, all of the chapters in this volume highlight thecomplexities surrounding the emergence and governance of new sexual behaviours and mores in the PRC. Attention to these complexities underscores the existence of tensions between how governmental authorities in China seek to shapethe sexual conduct of Chinese citizens and the ways in which that conduct isenacted in practice. But it also demonstrates that the relationship between China’sgovernmental authorities and new specifications of what constitutes good governance and the appropriate range of individual rights and obligations is not alwaysalready conflictual: it is an ongoing process of negotiation and contestation.Therefore future research on the nexus between sex and government in Chinashould be directed towards tracking the continued imbrication between the operations of Chinese government and the formation of new sexual subjectivities, ratherthan focusing primarily on perceived sites of resistance to official discourses.

Introduction: talking sex and sexuality in China 5China’s changing sexual culture and the natureof its governanceMedia reports on the PRC’s latest, i.e. sexual, revolution generally attributeChina’s changing sexual culture to the introduction of the Open Door Policy andhence Western influences. According to Amy Braverman (2002): ‘When Chinaopened its doors to international markets in the early 1980s, it inadvertently letin another modern phenomenon – the West’s sexual culture’. Celebrating thebelated arrival of ‘Open-door sexuality’, Braverman and other commentatorsvariously cite the work of Western sociologist, William Parish, and mainlandChinese sociologists, Li Yinhe and Liu Dalin, to suggest that ‘China’s sex lifewill mimic that of Western Europe’ in the not-too-distant future (ibid.; ‘Chinaundergoing sexual revolution’ 2003).In Chapter 1, ‘Transformations in the primary life cycle: the origins and natureof China’s sexual revolution’, Pan Suiming challenges this teleological narrativeby arguing that China’s ‘sexual revolution’ is neither a straightforward productof the Open Door policy, nor even of dramatic changes within the nature of sexuality itself. Instead, Pan argues that China’s altered sexual culture is a function ofchanges within the primary life cycle, a phrase which he uses to describe both thesum of and the relations between the most fundamental of human activities,namely, sex, reproduction, child-rearing, physical sustenance, and the attendantsocial relations that occur between the two sexes. While some scholars maydismiss this focus as heterosexist, Pan’s point is that heterosexual marriage wasand still is a fundamental organizing feature of Chinese society. He furthermaintains that Western constructions of sexuality, and associated explanations forsexual revolutions, are not always applicable to an examination of the Chinesecase, because sexuality in China has not been conceptualized as something that isindividualized in the body of the person, either historically or culturally.Pan subsequently traces the origins of China’s sexual revolution to shifts withinthe relations that make up the primary life cycle. Contrary to popular accounts ofthese shifts as a sign that individuals in China are finally claiming their ‘natural’rights to be free from the restrictions of traditional morality and an oppressivestate (Kristof 1993: B1, B6), Pan suggests that they owe much to government-ledinitiatives. The introduction and social acceptance of contraception, flowing fromthe imperatives of the one-child family policy, has freed Chinese women from thefear of unwanted pregnancy and undermined the former equation of sex withprocreation. Concomitantly, non-procreative sexual behaviours that were considered ‘abnormal’, such as auto-eroticism and premarital sex, are gaining socialacceptance. Hence Pan concludes that the CCP, whether intentionally or not, hasplayed an important role in promoting a new model of sex for leisure.Pan similarly attributes the growing importance of love in marriage, andrising incidences of divorce, to government-led initiatives. As he explains, lovebetween two individuals was not a prerequisite for marriage in traditional China:marriage was a familial and arranged concern. The CCP broke with this tradition by promulgating the 1950 Marriage Law, which outlawed concubinage and

6Elaine Jeffreysarranged marriages, thereby promoting free-choice marriage. Whilst noting thattraditional marital arrangements have not been abandoned, Pan contends thatthe growing importance of marital love, combined with the effects of the onechild family policy, has produced new expectations of what constitutes a ‘good’marriage and associated sexual behaviours. Love and sexual pleasure are nowviewed as an essential part of the marital relationship, which partly accounts forChina’s growing rate of divorce and extra-marital affairs.Other developments that Pan attributes to China’s sexual revolution are thechanging attitudes of young Chinese men and women respectively towards therelationship between love and sex. Recent survey responses indicate that Chinesemen under the age of 40 increasingly view sex in a manner that is independent ofromantic attachment (Pan Suiming et al. 2004: 422–3). They also are engaging innon-conventional and proscribed sexual behaviours, such as (serial) premaritalsex, and consuming pornography and prostitutional sex (ibid.). Given that a standard marker of the Western sexual revolution is the increased capacity of individuals to engage in non-monogamous sexual relations, Pan concludes that thechanging sexual behaviours of this particular group of men offers a genderedindication that a sexual revolution is happening in China

Elaine Jeffreys lectures in China studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. Recent publications include China, Sex and Prostitution(2004) London, New York: RoutledgeCurzon; and 'Feminist prostitution debates: are there any sex workers in China?' (2004) in Anne McLaren (ed.), Chinese Women: Living and Working,RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 165 .