总重红绿灯 | Stoplight in the Sky

So this afternoon we are going to head out and pester random Chinese people on the street for their opinions on adultery, premarital sex, and cohabitation. A topic not often discussed in the popular press here or in the US.

Last week I found out that one of my Chinese friends is currently cohabiting with three females, none of whom he finds attractive (恐龙”scarey dragons” is what he calls them). Cohabitation for the purposes of facilitating premarital sex is widely considered immoral in China, but cohabitation to share the rent is incomprehensible, at least it was to my teachers when I told them about it. I admit to not understanding myself. It’s not like China is short on single guys to live with. It may be that my friend has figured out the same thing I did, that single guys make horrible roommates, particularly Chinese “little emperors” who are accustomed to being taken cleaned up after by a swarm of relatives.

In Chinese discourses on vices, such as drugs, adultery, or other questionable sorts of fun, many Chinese leap to blame foreign influence, specifically Western influence. As far as sex goes, China is conservative in the extreme, and it’s difficult for me to tell exactly where this comes from. Certainly China has always extolled itself as a virtuous society. At the same time, China has a tradition of brothels (now resurgent), courtesans, and polygamy. However, the brothels in particular became symbolic of China’s submission to colonization, and thus the Nationalist and Communist revolutions tried to do away with them, alongside eliminating opium usage. It followed that  they advocated a rather victorian sexual sensibility. 

When most Americans of a social conservative bent think of China, they think of the one-child policy, forced abortions, sterilizations and the like. The strange thing is that China’s birth control policy is not driven by a secular sexual revolution; that when it comes to sex, the Chinese have more in common with Catholic conservatives than they do with Western atheists, much less Western feminists.

So is China about to have a sexual revolution? Not my area. But given Chinese people’s reactions, I predict that coed cohabitation is going to come far later than sexual cohabitation and the like, because it actually requires a far greater degree of sexual equality. It might also require that those people cohabiting not be virgins at the time.