Ruan - Sex in china: studies in sexology in chinese culture

Richard Green 1

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Fang Fu Ruan 1

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Less than a year before the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, I lectured on human sexuality at Peking Union Medical College. I described my research on the nonsexual behaviors of young boys that predicted later homosexuality. I asked the physicians in the audience whether comparable childhood behaviors were found among Chinese boys. I was told that there are no homosexuals in China. How exceptional, if true. Clearly, there was a need for a candid account of sex in China.

I invited Professor Ruan to write this book when we first met. The scope of his scholarship and personal experience is exceptional.

China is a nation with a meticulously recorded sexual past, a culture where ancient values confront contemporary politics.

China is a nation of erotic paradox:

Centuries ago, sexuality was glorifiedit was life enhancing, even granting immortality. Today s political climate is one of sexual repression.

Vivid portrayals of the sexual paraphilias were recorded hundreds of years ago. Today, China shuts down 42 publishers of erotic materials and seizes over 100,000 pornographic books in a single city. In a nation that celebrated erotic art, the death penalty awaits modem traffickers in pornography.

This is a country where social dancing is restricted, but 80 percent of the people approve of premarital sex. A wedding night instructional manual has a first printing of four million copies.

For sexologists, China teaches the history of human sexuality over two millennia. Here is the full range of sexual expression, embedded in the contexts of changing politics and ancient and modem religion.

A quarter of the world lives here.

With Professor Ruan s work, Westerners need no longer have a blind spot in their view of Eastern sexuality.

Richard Green

China today is sexually (and in many other ways) a very repressive society, yet ancient China was very different. Some of the earliest surviving literature of China is devoted to discussions of sexual topics, and the sexual implications of the Yin and Yang theories common in ancient China continue to influence Tantric and esoteric sexual practices today far distant from their Chinese origins.

In recent years, a number of books have been written exploring the history of sexual practices and ideas in China, but most have ended the discussion with ancient China and have not continued up to the present time. Fang Fu Ruan first surveys the ancient assumptions and beliefs, then carries the story to present-day China with brief descriptions of homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestism, transsexualism, and prostitution, and ends with a chapter on changing attitudes toward sex in China today.

Dr. Ruan is well qualified to give such an overview. Until he left China in the 1980s, he was a leader in attempting to change the repressive attitudes of the government toward human sexuality. He wrote a best-selling book on sex in China, and had written to and corresponded with a number of people in China who considered him as confidant and advisor about their sex problems. A physician and medical historian, Dr. Ruans doctoral dissertation was a study of the history of sex in China.

What appears most evident is just how complicated a topic sex can be. Though sex is a biological function, the expression of sexuality is influenced by psychological, sociological, cultural, and historical factors. Chinese attitudes toward sex have never been quite the same as Western ones. It is also evident that repression of and hostility to sexas has existed at various times in China, most recently under the Maoist governmentcan drive discussion of sex underground, but even underground there remains a great hunger for information about sex. Though such repression and its sequelae in lack of public discussion makes information about sex practices more difficult for the historian to ferret out, it seems clear that repression never eliminated homosexuality, prostitution, transvestism, or any other of the expressions of sexuality known to Western sexologists. Perhaps when China again becomes somewhat more open in the discussion of sexuality, the Chinese will be able to turn to Dr. Ruans book for information about sexuality, not only in their ancient past, but also in the period of the 1970s and 1980s, where his knowledge is based on his own personal investigations.

In sum, Sex in China is a welcome contribution to the sexological literature.

Though more than ten years have passed since China officially opened its doors to the Western world, this giant nation, with its population numbering in the billions, remains a land of mystery. Perhaps the deepest mysteries are those concerning sexual emotions and practicesforbidden territory to the Chinese themselves.

For the first 4,000 years of Chinese history, the prevailing Yin-Yang philosophy was the basis of open and positive attitudes toward human sexuality and a correspondingly rich sexological and erotic literature. However, the most recent 1,000 years of Chinas history have been characterized by repression and censorship which make the researchers task extremely difficult. Respectable scholars dared not address the topic of sex; all materials relating to sex, including ancient medical classics, vibrant fiction, and wonderful paintings, were censored and destroyed. Even the religiously motivated sexual treatises of the Taoists were almost completely lost. The situation in contemporary China is even worse. With the exception of a few government publications, materials concerning sexuality are strictly forbidden; in the worst case, an individual convicted of production of pornography may be sentenced to death.

Sex in China is an attempt to overcome these obstacles in order to provide the reader with a survey of sexual life in China from 3,000 years ago to the present. A strictly chronological presentation is unnecessarily restrictive. Instead, I have traced the history of a number of areas of sexological interest, including sexual philosophy, classical sexological literature, Taoist sexual myths and techniques, erotic fiction, prostitution, male and female homosexuality, transvestism, transsexualism, and political regulation of sexuality and sexual rights. In treating each of these topics, it has been my concern to outline the great contributions of the Chinese people to sexology and sexual literature, to elucidate the processes by which an open, sex-positive culture became negative and repressive, and to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of repressive governmental policies, whether practiced by imperial regimes or the current dictatorship.