But the popular narrative of a monolithic communist state oppressing people and human sexuality in a top-down fashion requires nuance. Discussions of sex and sexuality, while not exactly taboo in the Mao era, were incorporated into the discourse of ‘class struggle’. For example, the newly victorious Chinese Communist Party clamped down on the sex industry and venereal disease, which were seen as emblems of exploitative class and gendered relations.
Such policies by the CCP encouraged a normative view of sexuality — for sexuality to be seen as monogamous, marital and heterosexual, rather than pre-marital, extra-marital, commercial or homosexual. The nationalisation of industry that ensued, involving the establishment of socialist work units, agricultural collectives and restrictions on population mobility, restricted the physical spaces available to engage in non-marital sexual relations. The media’s emphasis on revolutionary state-building also removed the discursive space for alternative representations of sexual identity and politics.
The Cultural Revolution — from 1966 to 1976 — is often depicted as the zenith of sexual repression in China. Romance was seen as ‘bourgeois’ and women cut their hair short and dressed in androgynous clothing.
Yet personal memoirs show that many youthful members of the Red Guard had newfound opportunities to experience love and sex as they travelled around China without parental supervision. There were high levels of cohabitation and pre-marital pregnancy during this period, even as some Red Guard factions bullied people for being ‘immoral’ and prioritising ‘love’ over the Cultural Revolution. Some local cadres used their patriarchal-style authority to penalise pre-marital sexual relations and pregnancies, while others exploited that authority for their own sexual benefit.
The history of sexuality in the Mao era is thus more complicated than a straightforward narrative of government repression would suggest.
The claim that sex was actively repressed by the Maoist state is popular because it appeals to what historian and philosopher Michel Foucault calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’ — the assumption that sexuality is a ‘natural’ human attribute that modern government has sought to repress.
Foucault argues that we have become attached to the repressive hypothesis, despite varying degrees of historical inaccuracy, because talking about sex in terms of liberation from repression activates the ‘speaker’s benefit’ and gives the author the aura of being attached to an important political cause.
Foucault’s argument can be demonstrated by China’s now defunct one-child policy. This policy was introduced in 1979 as a means to guarantee future economic prosperity by curbing population growth. It became a two-child policy in 2016.
The policy was condemned by many as the world’s most extreme example of coercive government control over human reproduction.
But its implementation dramatically altered the lives of Chinese women by severing the historical link between sex and procreation. Women are living longer, largely because of declining fertility rates and maternal mortality, flowing from better access to contraception and health care. Chinese women are now spending less time childrearing and more time in full-time employment and other activities outside of the home.
The current limitation placed on sex for the purpose of procreation has also encouraged the expansion of public discourse about marital sex for pleasure and eroded physical restrictions on non-marital sexual relations.
It has also meant that parents have had to accept what are seen as ‘non-traditional’ sexual and lifestyle choices of their only child. Some lesbian, gay, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth are protesting against family pressures to marry to continue the family line. They are urging government authorities to support marriage equality and ‘equal rights to love’, in order to stop LGBTQ people from entering cooperative, ‘fake’ marriages with members of the opposite sex or gender.
Whether intentional or not, past and present domestic government policies have always played a significant role in promoting an expected model of sex and sexuality. Contemporary research on sex in China should consider how different governing strategies and socio-economic arrangements produce particular types of sexual cultures, rather than simply reinforcing the East–West divide.
Elaine Jeffreys is Professor of International Studies at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Haiqing Yu is Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese Media and Culture at the University of New South Wales (UNSW).
The authors’ latest book, Sex in China, is published by Polity.
I hope the author could have included the perspective of the Chinese (Asian culture as a whole) ancient culture into the analysis. While it is true that Communist Party’s policy affected the sexual practices of the people, but please do not criticize it straight from a Western viewpoint. Look at it with a more neutral eye, like about how China could immediately change a adopt the Western lifestyle right after deadly revolution? It is just similarly difficult to understand how the US saw such a big threat from Communism and launched a deadly war in Vietnam. It’s all about perceptions in the past that contemporary people cannot simply say right or wrong. Furthermore, the problems with most Asian young people is that they do not actually have the culture of free sex/ gender and do not understand the logic behind it, they also have the tendency have pre-marriage sex just to be cool without using proper protection, or to assume that they are homosexual, which is also a debate in the west. I hope the author would consider it too, to give a more comprehensive and fair picture.But thank you for your analysis, I like the part you described how the policies altered the lives of the women.
Thank you for your comments. It is no doubt that Chinese tradition and ancient culture plays a very important role in their sexual culture (and other aspects of their lives, no matter where they are and how well they are educated in the West). This has been discussed in our book. In this short opinion piece we focus on the role of nation-state and public policy in population control and management, as the title suggests. The complexity of sexual culture, particularly among youths (as you rightly points out), is an universal question. In the Chinese context, we need to break it down and tear it apart, along various human variables, such as gender, sexuality, age (the post-1980s, post-1990s, or post-2000s), class, region, education, religion, and ethnicity. Then one would give a fair go at evaluating the various factors that impact on young people’s perceptions and practices of sex, sexuality, and sexual citizenship.