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 taboo and romance was labelled a dangerous bourgeois affectation (Evans 1997). Discussions of same-sex love disappeared from official publications, only reappearing in the 1980s (Sang 2003; Martin 2010). Though a few articles on sexual health continued to be published in magazines and self-published erotic novels circulated underground throughout the 1960s, most young people, and even some medical professionals, remained uninformed about even basic sexual physiology (Zhou 1989; Zhang 2012).
Still, socialist institutional and legal changes profoundly reorganised the way youth would experience marriage and sexuality. The most important reform was the Marriage Law of 1950, a decisive break with a centuries-old patriarchal and familialist sexual culture. Polygyny was outlawed and replaced with strict monogamy. Men and women became equal before the law, and arranged marriages were banned. The results were uneven but profound. A conjugal family model centred on the husband and wife bond gradually supplanted the patriarchal multi-generational family where authority rested with the older generation. A culture of romantic love came to shape relationships even in rural China in the 1960s and 1970s. The gender-neutral term airen (love + person) became the standard term for spouse. Still, despite campaigns promoting free choice of partners based on love, the combination of traditional sexual conservatism and socialist puritanism prevented a culture of premarital dating or open sexual expression from emerging during this period (Yan 2003).
Revolutionary politics also shaped the sexual experiences ofyouth. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976) young people were called on to devote themselves to promoting Maoist thought in mass political campaigns, culminating in the forced migration of millions of urban youth to the countryside to learn from the peasants. Millions of unchaperoned youth found opportunities for sexual adventures and romance on these travels, including same-sex intimacies facilitated by dormitory life (Sang 2003: 163—66). Sexual violence, bribery and blackmail also were widespread, as officials used their unrestrained power to demand sexual favours from young women in return for permission to return to the city (Honig 2003; Zhang 2012). One former cadre I interviewed in 1995 described the exchange of sexual favours for food and other resources among ‘sent-down youth’ themselves. Like many others, he saw the moral chaos of the Cultural Revolution as contributing to the rapid changes in youth sexual morality that occurred in later decades.
With the death of Mao Zedong and the return to power of Deng Xiaoping, China in 1978 entered a period of ‘opening and reform’ that would radically transform Chinese society. Innovations in sexual expression among youth in the 1980s may seem modest now, but were bold at the time. Short stories such as Zhang Jie’s ‘Love Cannot Be Forgotten’ questioned the politicisation of private life and celebrated the uplifting value of romantic love. Youth revived the popular culture of partnered ballroom dancing, while Taiwanese and Hong Kong pop music provided the saccharine sound track for the ‘romantic revolution’ that swept China in the 1980s. Partly based on the romantic idealism of the New Culture Movement of the 1920s, including socialist ideals of free love marriage, this celebration of the power and legitimacy of romantic feelings (ganqing) formed the chief cultural basis for the enormous changes in youth sexual morality that would occur in the next decade (Farrer 2002: 29). Also in the 1980s, a small number of fictional depictions of same-sex love and non-fictional discussions of “homosexuality” began to appear in mainland magazines and books (Sang 2003: 169—70; Martin 2010: 75-92).
Despite some ‘opening up’, youth sexual culture in the 1980s remained profoundly conservative, especially for women. Secondary schools and universities maintained strict rules against premarital sex, and work units monitored the behaviour of young unmarried workers. Parents and youth retained a strong emphasis on female chastity, and heterosexual marriage remained a universal expectation. According to qualitative interviews by Zhou Xiao in the 1980s, many men claimed they would refuse to marry a woman who was not a virgin. If a woman had lost her virginity before marriage, her ‘value’ was lower both morally and in terms of the gifts and respect she could expect later as a bride. A woman’s resistance to premarital sex thus increased her value and her bargaining power with her husband-to-be. In practice, men pressured girlfriends into having premarital sex, but women bore the stigma oflost virginity and abortions (Zhou 1989). Women had limited space for sexual experimentation, and limited sexual rights. Moreover, men or women engaging in premarital, extramarital and same-sex sexual behaviour could arbitrarily be incarcerated under vague laws against “hooliganism,” until the crime was eliminated in 1997 (Li 2006).