Across 20 years, Chinese citizens are almost five times more likely to have sexual relations before marriage than ever before.
According to Li Yinhe, China’s first female sexologist, this development is because of a “hooliganism law” that enabled women to be arrested for having sex with more than one man.
“In the survey I made in 1989, 15.5 per cent of people had sex before marriage,” Ms Yinhe said in an interview with the BBC, as part of a documentary series for Her Story: The Female Revolution.
“But in the survey I did two years ago, the figure went up to 71 per cent,”
This dramatic change in such a short period of time marks what Yinhe claims is a ‘sexual revolution’ for the people of China, which will be discussed as part of a BBC documentary about The Female Revolution, featuring women around the world who are defining the struggle for equality in the 21st century.
But China’s new behaviour towards sexuality has been a slow burn.
Rewind to China pre-1997, a time when all sexual activities outside of marriage were illegal.
The production of pornography, or organising ‘sex parties’ came with the death penalty if caught, and the punishment for prostitution wasn’t far off in terms of severity.
In 1996, a bathhouse owner was sentenced to death for organised prostitution. Compare this with a 24-year-old Beijing woman who recently published seven sex novels online, gaining a viewership of over 80,000, but who received a punishment of just six months prison under the alleviated laws.
With the law regarding sex outside of marriage overturned in 1997, the punishment for having sex outside marriage has fallen off, and fewer people are being punished for these ‘offences.’ Because of this, as Ms Yinhe suggests, China is in the midst of an “era of important cha
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