As this overview of the past century shows, Chinese youth sexual culture developed from generation to generation, with the 1990s as a key inflection point in trends towards greater youth sexual autonomy. The use of ‘romantic love’ as a legitimating sexual discourse in the 1990s can be traced back to the early twentieth century. Similarly, […]

As such survey results reveal, Chinese youth in the 2000s remained cautious in their own sexual behaviour though permissive in the abstract. Although the numbers of youth reporting sexual experiences rose over the years, they were lower than in many other societies. For example, in surveys conducted in 2005—6, 36.6 per cent of male and […]

The youth sexual revolution did not end in the 2000s but changed in form and focus as some of the ‘bold’ practices of the 1990s became taken-for-granted features of sexual life for a new generation. Chinese youth are fond of naming generations by the decade of birth; for example those born in the 1980s are […]

A youth sexual revolution in the 1990s would challenge this patriarchal culture of premarital chastity, bringing unprecedented sexual freedom to young women as well as young men. Although its origins can be found in some of the trends described above, including socialist notions of gender equality and the popular cultural celebrations of romantic love, the […]

In the 1960s, however, youth became the focus of the Maoist social experiment aimed at creating a new socialist subject. With its militant commitment to class struggle, Maoist China from the late 1950s until the late 1970s was a ‘buttoned-up’ society, literally and figuratively, fostering an ‘anti-sexual’ public culture in which public sexual displays were […]

Globally, the emergence of distinct youth cultures is associated with industrialisation, urbanisation, institutionalised education, mass media, and delayed marriage. These conditions appeared in some mainland Chinese cities as early as the 1920s. The New Culture Movement of the 1920s promoted women’s liberation and the moral superiority of marriages based on romantic love (Lee 2006). Beyond […]

James Farrer Why youth and sexuality? The advent of ‘youth’ as a recognised life stage between childhood and full adulthood has been accompanied in many societies by radical changes in sexual culture, involving such sexual innovations such as ‘dating’ and ‘hooking up’ and an informalisation of sexual mores (Bailey 1988; Wouters 1987). China is no […]

A 2006 survey launched by a coalition of NGOs in South Korea shows that transgender people face constant challenges in school and public life, suffer discrimination in recruitment and employment, and experience unstable social and family relationships. Due to their gender identity, many transgender people are subjected to insults (65.4 per cent), sexual harassment (44.9 […]

The Yogyakarta Principles call on governments to repeal any laws that criminalise the expression of gender identity — through dress, speech or mannerisms. It appears that none of the jurisdictions in East Asia under consideration specifically prohibit cross-dressing. However, during the 1960s and 1970s a provision against ‘wearing odd outfits’ was vigorously enforced against cross-dressing […]

Transsexuals are individuals with a compelling desire to change their physical sexual characteristics either from male to female (MTF) or from female to male (FTM). The condition is recognised internationally as justifying treatment. The current American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-V, speaks of ‘gender dysphoria’, a change from the earlier […]