Sexual Lives in Contemporary China: Young People Negotiating Changing Moral Standards

There is a booming market in sex-related industries in China and sexual attitudes have changed since the ‘open door’ policy was instigated in 1978. Previous studies conducted in metropolitan cities like Beijing and Shanghai highlight increasingly liberal sexual attitudes among young adults. However, governmental regulations, including delivering limited sex education in schools under the ideal of a harmonious society, aim to cultivate civilised and self-restrained citizen-subjects. As a result, young adults face a conflict between ‘socialist morality’ and ‘a sexualised society’. To examine young adults’ opinions on premarital sex and changing moral standards in this context, I carried out semi-structured interviews with 20 unmarried young men and women aged between 21 and 28 in Houma, Linyi, and Chongqing. These three inland cities were selected because of their relatively slow economic development and because they have been less studied in existing academic work. I also conducted two focus groups with Chinese students in the UK to explore their perspectives on virginity. In addition to social and political pressures, these young adults, especially women, are facing many challenges in everyday social interactions, which are characterised by double standards of morality and differentiated gender roles. I argue that they adopt the strategy of the ‘culture of conformity’ (Huang and Pan, 2009) in order to cope with these tensions and display decent morality. I found little evidence among participants that premarital sex is delinked from marriage. In discussing these issues I critically interrogate Pan’s (2008) propositions on a Chinese sexual revolution and conclude, following Wang (2017), that sexual revolution in China is an unfinished project due to the persistence of sexual double standards. Moreover, these young Chinese adults still hold conservative views of their own sexual lives, although they are more ready to embrace liberal others than their parents’ generation.