Permissive but cautious Chinese youth

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 26.8 per cent of female Chinese university students reported having had sexual intercourse compared to 63 per cent of male and 62.3 per cent of female Japanese university students. Chinese university students were also much less likely than their Japanese peers to have dated or kissed a romantic partner (Farrer et al. 2012: 268-69).

One aspect of the relative caution in sexual behaviour is a lingering concern about female chastity among many post-80s Chinese youth. For instance, in the 2010 survey cited above, only 22.4 per cent of 14-17 year-old males and 6.1 per cent of females agreed with the statement that ‘female chastity has no importance’. Even though a majority of these youth agreed that premarital sex was ‘not a moral problem’, many still saw virginity as valuable, even if no longer an absolute requirement (Pan and Huang 2011, 2012). Similarly, in a 2003 survey, 60 per cent of the men admitted they wanted to marry a virgin (McMillan 2006).

In qualitative research conducted in the mid-2000s among Shanghai youth, many young informants still interpreted women’s ‘chastity’ as a sacrifice a woman made to a man and the first

sex as a valuable gift that should be preserved for a beloved partner. Referring to this discourse, some young women argued for delaying or denying sex to a boyfriend, and men described feeling hesitant to have sex with a girlfriend, especially when the woman was a virgin (Farrer et al. 2012). In this regard, women remained, in the words of sociologist Pan Suiming, ‘second class sexual citizens’ whose sexual agency was limited by the stigma of lost virginity, though much less so than in the past. Even as a minority of youth eagerly participated in activities such as one-night stands and casual sex, most youth expressed attachment to a standard sexual script which bound sex to a verbal declaration of love in the context of a committed romantic (lianai) relationship (Farrer et al. 2012: 272-75).

This is not to say that sex always followed this standard relational script. Some Chinese youth preferred to let sex happen ‘naturally’, itself a kind of script for unscripted sex that meant that when the proper context arose, people should simply allow themselves to follow their desire. Sex that happened in the ‘right’ environment was often described as spontaneous, or ‘going with the flow’, although it often involved one partner (in a heterosexual couple, usually the man) consciously arranging an appropriate sexual environment. ‘Going along with the flow’, though usually associated with ‘romantic feelings’ (ganqing), could even excuse sex alongside an already established relationship. One corollary of this ideal of ‘going with the flow’ was that overt planning for sexual behaviour could be taken as a sign of rational calculation incompatible with true romance. Carrying condoms, for example, could be perceived negatively by a young woman as a sign that the man was planning for sex. The valorisation of unplanned spontaneous sex might also contribute to the high incidence of premarital pregnancy and abortion among youth. In recent years over half of all abortions in China were performed on unmarried women (see Jankowiak and Moore 2012: 296).

Despite this script of “going with the flow,” most youth approached sex cautiously. Youth typically delayed sex until their early 20s. In 2006 the mean age of first sexual intercourse for people aged 20-29 was 21.88 years (Pan 2007). One likely reason for their continued personal caution was the intense familialism of this generation. Most were singletons raised by two parents and four grandparents, enveloped in a cocoon of personal care and academic pressures, with limited chance to develop a rich social life. At the same time, their parents had grown up in an era when sexual discussions were taboo. Roughly half of 14-17 year-olds in the 2010 survey reported that their mothers and fathers either prohibited, restricted or worried about their relationships with the opposite sex, while 83 per cent of males and 86 per cent of females reported they had never talked about sexual topics with their parents (Pan and Huang 2012).

The biggest challenge for post-80s youth — as for all mainland Chinese people — was the escalating economic inequality in the country. Youth sexual culture was increasingly influenced by the flaunting of transactional sexual relationships by wealthy and powerful men. Public culture was saturated with stories of kept mistresses, young women marrying for money, and men unable to afford marriage (or the housing ownership seen as a requirement for marriage for men). Migrant women in particular remained vulnerable to sexual exploitation in the flourishing sex trades, while impoverished rural men faced the possibility of finding no female partners at all. Such gendered pressures on youth might not entail a full-scale retreat to earlier patterns of patriarchal marriage, but they could have other consequences such as delayed marriage, greater commodification of sexuality, and a greater separation of sexual intimacy from marriage.

More recently, a post-1990s generation and post-2000s generation are emerging. It is unclear how much further or in what directions China’s youth sexual revolution will develop. For one, these youth will be the first to be raised by parents who themselves came of age during the 1990s sexual revolution. The generation gap on sexual issues might close significantly, allowing for greater communication and less anxiety about sexual matters ranging from mas­turbation (still widely perceived as unhealthy) to homosexuality (often still hidden from par­ents).

We should be cautious, however, about predicting an increasingly liberal sexual culture. The proportion of sexually active youth steadily rose from 1990 to 2010, but it is by no means inevitable that Chinese youth will become increasingly sexually permissive. By way of com­parison, Japanese university and high school students actually reported a steep decline in sexual behaviour in a 2012 national survey, a reversal of steadily increasing trends since 1974 (Asahi 2012). In China, no such reversal is evident. Still, economically and academically, contemporary youth face a more frustrating and competitive environment than the post-70s generations, leaving less time for social and sexual activities. Unlike the post-70s generation, younger cohorts are increasingly dependent on their parents’ financial support, both for educational and marital expenses. In comparison with urban youth in the 1990s, they also seem much more nationalistic and perhaps less inclined to model their behaviour on an imagined ‘liberal West’, though not rejecting Western-style liberalism altogether (Baculinao 2012).

One clear trend is the rapidly shrinking youth cohort. The United Nations projects that the male population aged 15—24 will fall 18.5 per cent between 2010 and 2020, and that the female population in that age group will fall an even sharper 23.9 per cent (a result of sex-selective abortion) (Lahart 2011). Given the smaller youth population, widening economic inequality, a male-heavy gender imbalance, and the continued predominance of ‘singletons’, an even more cautious youth generation could be in the making.