Sex and Morals in Red China
TAYLOR, CHARLES
SEX AND MORALS In RED CHINA by CHARLES TAYLOR This is the third of three articles on Communist China by Mr. Taylor. They are adapted from his forthcoming book, Reporter in Red China, to be...
...During his stay he was one of four correspondents from the West and the only North American...
...His report on China's foreign policy, "The View from Peking," appeared in our May issue...
...Ling laughed...
...If the old people are stubborn, they can be reported to local Communist officials, who will patiently persuade them to change their minds...
...Here, perhaps, the Chinese leaders are unconsciously fighting a last-ditch battle for male supremacy) . In a new China bursting to be built there simply isn't time for sex-or so officials would like us to believe...
...Since the Chinese ideologues find it impossible to reconcile Marx and Malthus, it is seldom admitted that the main reason for the muted birth-control campaign is the need to curb population growth...
...Birth control has probably made more headway in the towns and cities, although in the absence of statistics and surveys it is impossible to be certain (the Chinese took some sort of census in 1964, but have never released the results...
...Will you dance...
...This is a very common question which we often get from the seamen of capitalist countries...
...Encouraged by her father, she started spying on her uncle...
...Ling's answer neatly fitted the Chinese charge of creeping revisionism in the Soviet Union and its allies: "Not in the past," he said...
...No less an authority than the editor of the People's Daily ruled that since standards of living were improving and more people had more money, it was permitted to wear brighter, fancier clothes...
...The women still dress like men and walk like men, and often you can be sure of the sex only by the pigtail...
...China has a desperate shortage of engineers, doctors, and other professional people...
...They see it, first of all, in the women...
...but his niece refused to cover up for him...
...Yet few seem willing to take him at his word...
...But today these passages have been removed from Mao's Collected Works...
...I was told that abortions were easy to arrange and that the sterilization of either man or wife is actively encouraged...
...Young people are taught above all that their loyalty belongs to the collective: their commune, factory, or office, and, ultimately, the whole society...
...First, we must have knowledge so we can serve the people better when we graduate...
...Any more might hurt the mother's health...
...I won't allow you to get away with it...
...The sailors wrecked the place, of course...
...First, we tell them that this is a socialist country, so there can be nothing like that...
...One day, when the rest of the peasants were out in the fields, she caught him coldsneaking off to market with two buckets of the team's wine...
...Ling's official title was strictly in my mind...
...Ling showed me ping-pong tables and a shooting gallery...
...According to the newspaper, Uncle Tang was sternly punished and his niece was praised for "her exemplary act of impartiality...
...China Youth Daily told how the girl, Tang Yu-lien, grew suspicious of her uncle, Tang Chiu-chiang-"a man seriously affected by bourgeois thought...
...She looked horrified, then giggled, but said nothing more...
...Shortly after the Chinese opened their new port at Hsinkang, outside Tientsin, they were visited by an Eastern European freighter...
...they asked...
...Of course, I dare to mind your business...
...Uncle Tang had been elected deputy leader of his production team and worked in the team's brewery...
...Given this need, it makes good sense to encourage young people to concentrate on their studies...
...Sometimes it is overcome, but young people who insist on marrying short of the approved age can find themselves speedily shipped to different parts of the country...
...Today these ceremonies must be simple, even spartan...
...It suggested that young people should study the Works of Chairman Mao, build up their bodies through physical exercise, watch plays and movies, and visit parks...
...But since Chinese officials rarely concede that their stern demands ever lead to mental breakdowns, it is usually impossible to confirm these reports or to know whether the alleged suicide has resulted, to any extent, from sexual re pression...
...On communes and in cities across China, in dozens of conversations with young men and women, I received the same standard reply: "We don't think of getting married yet...
...Today, of course, all that is changed, and I watched thousands of Chinese enjoying jugglers, acrobats, and patriotic operas with apparent pleasure and total decorum...
...Said a stern-faced young girl with large glasses, "We live here together like brother and sister...
...This is where the imperialists began to oppress the Chinese people . . ." Later my earnest young interpreter showed me the park which allegedly had the infamous sign, No DOGS OR CHINESE (old-timers insist that the actual wording was never quite so blatant), and assured me that before the Communist victory no Chinese woman could walk along the Bund at night for fear of being raped by drunken American sailors...
...Grabbing the buckets with one hand and her uncle with the other, she shouted, "You dare to rob the collective...
...They led me straight into a birthcontrol exhibition, where for some time they studied the diagrams and devices with serious concentration and not a single snicker...
...They might also lower the family's living standards...
...All the same," he told the prettiest girl, "I bet you have a secret love...
...And they take up too much time...
...With evident dismay a Canton newspaper complained that some young workers "dress or pretty up for dating and romancing until late at night...
...Among the poor peasantry, triangular and multilateral relationships are almost universal...
...Scrambling aboard, Chinese officials asked politely how they could entertain the crew...
...At their homes, at their schools or places of work, Party officials and even their closest friends join in putting on the pressure, and it is usually effective...
...This spectacle so distressed a distinguished Asian visitor that he shocked his hosts by blurting in anguish, "What have you done with the women's breastscut them off...
...Attacking the system of arranged marriages in an article written in 1919, Mao saluted "the tidal wave of the freedom Something to crow about- The Progressive for ChristmilS to love...
...When does the dance begin...
...In the seamen's club they found a bar well stocked with Chinese bever ages, an orchestra tuning up, and the same polite Chinese officials, all dressed alike in their blue and gray highcollared tunics...
...Yes, they knew about dating...
...In the early years of the revolution, Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues had a distinct romantic streak, for all their adherence to a doctrine of hard work and plain living...
...They are adapted from his forthcoming book, Reporter in Red China, to be published by Random House...
...They treat the basic act and all its complications in a sensible, no-nonsense way...
...Oh...
...In their attitude to marriage the Communists are partly concerned with undermining the authority of the family...
...We advocate birth control because we want the people to have a better life," the official said...
...There is no doubt about the priority, as was indicated when the People's Daily attacked people who said that peasants should "love their communes as their family...
...AS THE British-built Viscount banked down through the clouds, the stewardess told us to fasten our seatbelts and then began a lengthy tirade: "We are now approaching Shanghai...
...In his own graphic words, ,"With its gamblers, prostitutes, pock-pickets [sic], local despots, and other dirty things, the Great World was a miniature of old Shanghai...
...Ling, Vice-Director of the Club-young, bespectacled, and very intent...
...On the ground floor there was a reading room stocked with Chinese magazines and political pamphlets in many languages, including such current favorites as On Khrushchev's Phony Communism and its Historical Lessons for the W orid...
...We lead them toward a healthy spare-time life...
...Now, they are completely equal (well, almost, since there is still only a small proportion of women in higher government and Communist Party ranks...
...What was the answer...
...Actually, the Communist rulers have never tried to wipe out the family unit, as scare stories in the West have often stated...
...This has Involved considerable rethinking by the Chinese leaders, as well as some rewriting of the official record...
...No," he answered firmly...
...The Chinese point out that it is traditional for most Chinese women to wear trousers, especially in the countryside...
...On the other hand, no foreigner can be sure what happens in the countryside, especially after dark...
...Then we do our best to meet their just requests-to see football matches, acrobatic performances, and so on...
...My nights in Shanghai were, understandably, hardly eventful, for as part of the new moral order the Chinese shield their women from grasping foreign hands...
...When it comes to choosing a partner, comrades are told to abjure bourgeois concepts of romantic love and seek out someone with a correct political viewpoint...
...With their baggy .shirts and slacks, each seems determined to disguise and even to disown her feminine charms...
...Would dating couples be ridiculed or punished...
...These shapeless bundles seem members of some Orwellian AntiSex League...
...By downgrading woman's sexual role, the Chinese also seek to emphasize her new social and political emancipation...
...When I asked them what they did for relaxation, they mentioned swimming, boating, and a movie once a week...
...I asked if Communist sailors ever raised the same subject...
...In the north in the winter men and women alike bundle themselves into blue cotton padded uniforms, sexless but practical...
...We tell them that two children are ideal...
...For an hour the sailors drank steadily at the bar and engaged in desultory conversation with their hosts...
...Even in the cities, where the supervision is stricter, I have often seen young people in flagrant offense of the official doctrines...
...Taylor recently returned after eighteen months in China as resident correspondent for The Globe and Mail of Toronto...
...Did they get treated in the same way...
...Although their methods are much more sweeping and totalitarian, the Chinese Communists would seem to agree with Arnold Toynbee's theory that Western civilization has progressed to its present high technological levels partly because we have caused our young people to postpone, in a highly artificial manner, the full flowering of their sexuality long past puberty and thave thus prolonged the period of education...
...Proud of their indepen- dence yet traumatized by their past humiliation by European powers, they are determined that foreigners in new China should behave themselves...
...His niece became curious when she saw that he had wine at · every meal and always returned from the market with lots of meat...
...Hardly anyone was using the library, but there was a good crowd of European sailors watching a movie in the theater upstairs...
...More traditional than new, it has its roots in the doctrines of Confucius-although/ for Confucius, unchecked sexual dalliance was a menace to the basic institution of the family...
...for the Communists, it threatens the interests of the state...
...She asked him to make her slacks tighter around the hips and more ta pered in the legs...
...Far from advocating sexual freedom, the Chinese leaders now decree the repression and sublimation of all such urges...
...In the·West, I said, undergraduates spent a lot of time dating...
...That was too much for the young administrative director of the university, who saw that I was getting an impression that was not entirely favorable...
...but they have sought to eliminate its reactionary influence, not to eradicate the whole system...
...also, caressing, fondling, gazing at each other, and prattling about love...
...In Shanghai, a city of ten million, a young official assured me that China was not, in fact, overpopulated...
...But the moral was clear: in new China, loyalty to the collective outweighs loyalty to the family...
...Youngsters insisting on their legal rights usually find such "persuasion" overwhelming...
...If anyone was shocked that the girl had ratted on a relative, the newspaper failed to report the fact...
...she exclaimed, widening her beautiful black eyes and shaking her silken pigtails...
...This campaign is waged with great persistence, as witness the praise heaped upon a nineteen-year-old peasant girl in Hupeh province, who put the fmger on her wicked uncle...
...In the context of formal interviews their statements to foreigners must be regarded with skepticism...
...Many foreigners have a conception of the Chinese female that is based upon the fragile beauties on ancient scrolls, the elaborately adorned heroines of Peking Opera, or the silk-sheathed bargirls of Hong Kong and Singaporea conception as unrealistic as it is romantic...
...Chinese women, it is stated, have new rights, new responsibilities, and new dignity, and are no longer the playthings of the domineering male...
...As we looked in, a young Chinese girl and boy were staring misty-eyed from the screen-it was the climax of a love scene, and they were at least five feet apart...
...It is the same with the marriage ceremony, which was always meant to be lavish and often put families into debt for years...
...Sometimes you see exceptions, de pending partly on the season...
...At first their attitudes were liberal, almost bohemian...
...It is not only the foreigner who suffers from this new puritanism, for the stern regulation of sexual activity has become a major part of the Chinese Communist ethic...
...With great approval Radio Peking broadcast the story of the wedding of Tan Kan-mei, a member of a women's militia battalion in Honan Province...
...From the moment they enter China foreigners are made aware of this new dispensation...
...This, at any rate, is the intention, although attacks in the press indicate that old habits die hard, especially in the countryside...
...By law men can marry at twenty and girls at eighteen...
...Then he took me to the Great World, the five-story amusement center in the old French Concession, where foreigners went for girls, boys, cards, and opium...
...Seeking to impose their discipline on the Chinese masses, determined to eradicate all "bourgeois" and "revisionist" tendencies, these romantic revolutionaries have become the sternest of puritans...
...In an important way it is misleading to speak of puritanism in China, since the Chinese version is so different from what we know in the West...
...That ended amid the early euphoria of the Great Leap Forward, as officials proclaimed instant industrialization and maintained that in the Communist millenium, soon to be achieved, there need be no limits on the numbers of Chinese...
...Sometimes, it appears, not all the foreign sailors are pacified by pingpong or cowed by criticism...
...And in a country where most women work, tackling almost every job, loose-fitting, hardwearing, comfortable clothes are a practical necessity...
...For centuries the Chinese family was the main stabilizing factor in a nation that was often wracked by political and economic turmoil...
...But all the evidence indicates that whatever its value, moral or practical, the new puritanical code of the Chinese leaders seems to be less than totally effective...
...Once the ultraexclusive Shanghai Club, favorite rendezvous of bankers, diplomats, and other members of the Occidental elite, today the famous bar (it measures about 100 feet) is still intact, but the "imperialists" have been expelled, and the building is now a Social Club for Chinese and Foreign Seamen...
...all young people to "learn from Tang Yu-lien her clear-cut class stand of whom to love and whom to hate...
...Even then, pregnancies among the unmarried are not uncommon...
...It was evident that any ambiguity in Mr...
...A few days later an official from their embassy in Peking was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and sternly presented with a bill for the damages...
...But the others took a different line...
...As a conservative force in society, the family was a prime target for the Communists...
...Uncle Tang tried persuasion and then threats-"If you dare spoil my reputation, I'll break your jaw and tear your mouth wide open...
...As the Great Leap floundered, officials adopted more sober, pragmatic policies, while again recognizing the need to check their population swell (officially, the Chinese claim a population of 700,000,000...
...Ling, "and," he added sternly, "they also get criticism...
...Even permanent waves, he added, were not necessarily signs of a bourgeois outlook...
...When I first arrived in China, officials in Shanghai were whip ping up a big campaign against a lady who had an argument with her tailor...
...Yet that was hardly fair, for the Chinese girl is not noted for her mammillary development...
...In Canton, one sultry Saturday evening, I followed a young boy and girl walking hand-in-hand through the People's Park of Culture...
...We must finish our studies, go where the Party sends 'us and work hard for the people...
...Officials also regard dating with suspicion since it can lead young comrades off the proper proletarian path...
...Lately some individuals from socialist countries have started to ask this question...
...On every commune that I visited I found clinics disseminating instruction and contraceptives...
...Social rather than religious, the contemporary Chinese puritanism is far from being entirely a Communist innovation...
...Birth control is again being frankly advocated, although not with the same sweeping enthusiasm that marked the 1956-57 campaign...
...To a man the sailors requested a dance...
...all she wanted were "the Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, a night soil pail, and a wooden rifle...
...Whatever their feelings, others must find it difficult to escape the constant surveillance of zealous Communist Party cadres and other activists, since there is little privacy in China today...
...Later, however, the line began to change...
...We shut the bar at eleven p.m.," said Mr...
...The editor urged...
...some Western experts say it must be more than 750,000,000, and is growing by between two and 2.5 per cent each year) . Officials admit that birth control is making only slow progress in the countryside, where peasants have always regarded large families as a form of social security for their old age and as a guarantee that they will be sufficiently honored after their death...
...Next evening several dozen husky seamen put on their best clothes and went ashore...
...In a minute," beamed the Chinese...
...By discouraging dating and early marriage, the Chinese act to check the population growth, but there is another practical aspect...
...It might be true, but she wasn't letting on...
...But it was also often an instrument of injustice and tyranny, with the old dominating the young and the men dominating the women...
...SEX AND MORALS In RED CHINA by CHARLES TAYLOR This is the third of three articles on Communist China by Mr...
...In fact, said the quietest and most serious boy, they could date each other if they wanted to...
...How else to explain the mutilations practiced on their lovely, glossy, jet-black tresses-now either scissored short in the plainest of trims, or else constricted in pigtails hanging down from floppy caps...
...These feelings are expressed most forcefully in Shanghai, where the foreigners had their largest concessions and greatest privileges...
...This is so the sailors can get back to their ships, have a good rest, and work well the next day...
...The Chinese, while stringent in their sexual outlook, are far from prudish...
...In general, it seems that officials tolerate a certain amount of romance, but interfere whenever it becomes too blatant or causes the student to neglect his studies...
...He stoutly refused to make such "bizarre" clothing, and his praises were sung in the newspapers and at hundreds of meetings called in factories and offices to discuss this vital question...
...Its population density was much less than that of Britain and many other Western countries, and especially in the northwest there were vast tracts of wilderness that could, and would, be developed to take millions more...
...But medical workers often told me it was an uphill battle to overcome centuries of ignorance and superstition...
...As such it was under attack and starting to disintegrate several decades before the Communist victory...
...In the same vein, the magazine Chinese Women said, "Young people now need the revolutionary emotions of the proletariat, not the vulgar soft perceptions of the bourgeoisie...
...In the Pei Hai and other Peking parks I sometimes accidentally disturbed boys and girls lying in the thicker grass, and on warm evenings along the waterfront in Canton, there are couples in the shadows, clinging together on the benches...
...With the warmer weather there is more diversity in dress, and on a summer day in Peking you can see signs that the Chinese have not lost all feeling for fashion-perhaps a young girl walk ing down the Wang Fu Ching, the main shopping street, with a red ribbon in her hair, a pretty patterned blouse, and slacks that are slightly tapered...
...Foreign students at Chinese universities report that many of their Chinese friends do date, and that some make love...
...Suddenly the band struck up a martial strain, and each sailor was solemnly approached by a Chinese man...
...They get the same explanation," said Mr...
...Young people are taught to resist their parents and their grandparents when they advocate such bourgeois and feudal practices as spending too much money on weddings...
...they asked...
...You have stolen wine and evaded tax...
...Describing the habits of peasants in his native province in his famous Hunan Report of 1927, he wrote, "They also enjoy considerable sexual freedom...
...But the girls had not arrived...
...But among the young there is a great deal of genuine idealism, and I suspect that many are sincere in their determination to serve the state with all their energies...
...In the past she might have been in trouble for adorning herself in even such a tentative way...
...They add that the clinging cheongsam is of alien, Manchu origin, and was introduced only in recent times...
...This opinion was echoed in a Peking University dormitory, where I interviewed six boys and girls, all in their early twenties and their fourth year of a five- THE PROGRESSIVE year English course...
...The newspaper warned sternly that they might become corrupt and degenerate, and fall prey to class enemies spreading bourgeois and capitalist ideas...
...Gone are the days of foot-binding and arranged marriages, of daughters sold as slaves and prostitutes...
...In every city I found cheap contraceptives displayed in drug stores and department stores, including most of the main devices known to the West except The Pill...
...Nowhere is the change more obvious than at the spacious four-story house on the Bund that is the home of The Longest Bar in the World...
...To the Chinese, past and present, there is nothing sinful in the body nor is there any need to abominate the flesh...
...Said a second boy, "We don't date because we have to save our energies...
...Did they know what that meant...
...Here, as elsewhere in the sprawling port, the entertainment is rigorously healthy...
...I t should be remembered that such directives mark an emancipating advance from the old custom whereby parents arranged the marriages of their children, thinking mainly of the wealth involved and little of their offsprings' feelings...
...I remarked that in other ports I had visited sailors had occasionally been known to seek out female companionship...
...In the evenings, for instance, if you have a lot of children, it's much more difficult to settle down and study the Works of Chairman Mao...
...Of course, they don't ask it straight out like the seamen from capitalist countries, but we know their meaning...
...As dating is discouraged, so are early marriages, and partly for the same reason-so that young people can devote themselves fully to their studies (another reason, less publicized, is the need to keep the population down...
...From Peking Uni versity and other colleges one occasionally receives reports of suicides...
...Kan-mei refused to receive any expensive presents...
...In Shanghai, always the most bourgeois and westernized of the Chinese cities, there are often couples mildly necking along the Bund...
...Nine o'clock and still no girls...
...In the basement Mr...
...Many young Chinese seem to honor the new sexual code...
...Nearby a notice advertised the next attrac tion: Premier Chou En-lai in Albania"A Colorful Documentary Film...
...It defined these latter as "walking with the loved one arm in arm, in parks and on streets, in cinemas, at dances, in restaurants...
...Unlike the Western puritan, the Chinese are not obsessed with any sense of guilt or sin, at least in sexual matters (it has been argued that in political affairs the Chinese Communists have forsaken the traditional morality, based on shame, to introduce the whole apparatus of guilt, confession, repentance, and forgiveness that is common to both the Christian and Communist ways...
...Somewhat taken back, the Chinese consulted among themselves, and then allowed it could be done, but would take twenty-four hours to arrange...
...In practice men are usually "persuaded" to hold off until they are twenty-nine or thirty and girls until they are twenty-five or twenty-six, although special dispensations are sometimes given to army officers and Communist Party cadres...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
