As millions returned to work after one of the most stressful holidays in years on Monday October 8, the Tenth Annual Guangzhou National Sex Culture Festival was finishing its last day. “Look at the time,” Professor Zhu Jiaming, one of the organisers, said delightedly. “Three hours before closing on the last day, and it’s still packed!”
The Sexpo’s remit is to “Promote sexual science, advocate sexual civilization, set up sexual ethics, spread sex education and improve sexual health” (以弘扬性科学、倡导性文明、普及性教育、树立性道德、促进性健康为宗旨) and features a forum of experts each year tackling a different theme. This year, it was sperm – or rather, lack of it.
China’s sperm difficulties are perhaps unique. For example: Last year, Huazhong University of Science and Technology medical student Zheng Gang (35) walked into a university-affiliated sperm bank and opened an account. What happened afterwards is now the subject of a 4 million yuan lawsuit in the Wuhan city. Zheng passed a medical check-up and made four donations; the legal limit is five. But after making the last donation in October, Zheng Gang collapsed and died. The actual cause of his death is in dispute but for Zheng’s family, it was clearly the act of donation; the university, meanwhile, is evoking unspecified “foreign forces” in its defense. Further murky details can be found in this Global Times report.
Bizarre as it is, the case sheds some rare light on one of the odder superstitions in China, the idea that masturbation can be a life-threatening habit for the unwary male. The theory is a very old one – some Daoist beliefs dictates that all sex should be geared towards gathering energy from heterosexual congress; solo sex is therefore a waste of good qi – muddled in with some good old-fashioned, down-on-sex Communist moralizing (of which more later). But the belief that onanism can be harmful to a man’s health has certainly taken a hold.
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Zhu Ming is a Beijing-born student at the Communications University of China, where many of China’s future reporters and news anchors are trained. As background for this story, I spent some time on the campus chatting to students about their attitudes to sperm donations, which can offer a needy undergraduate about three- to five-thousand yuan, enough to pay half their annual tuition fees. But Zhu Ming is not interested: “I would not donate my sperm – ever! Not even if they pay me loads of money. It’s not just because it’s a deeply private thing,” he goes on to explain, “but also because I do not want to cause conflict with my family – as I know exactly how my mom would react to that if I did.”
This kind of attitude (and the fact that they’re not permitted to advertise) has left China’s eleven sperm banks short of product: The average wait for infertile couples to obtain semen from sperm banks is now at least a year. In September 2011, Luo Wenzhi, the head of the Guangdong Family Planning Bureau, was driven to make a public plea: “Donating your sperm is healthy,” he promised. “It won’t hurt you nor kill you.” Inevitably, an unregulated black market has stepped into the breach with the Global Times reporting last week on a number of eligible males offering to “donate” their sperm “directly.”
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Official press conference of the Tenth Annual Guangzhou National Sex Culture Festival.
Into this muddle of ignorance, entrepreneurship and bureaucrat rhetoric, and courtesy of the Guangdong Family Planning Bureau, comes the Guangzhou National Sex Culture Festival, now a fixed date in the city’s cluttered expo calendar. For those who wished to hear it, the afternoon of the first day featured a panel of eminent professionals discussing “Everything you want to know about sperm donation” (“捐精，你想知道的事儿”). It’s hard to gauge what effect their prepared speeches had on the national deficiency but Professor Peng Xiaohui, a veteran sexpo attendee and vice secretary-general of the World Association of Chinese Sexologists, had nothing but good things to say: “My general impression is, [the sexpo] gets better every year, whatever its format, content or theme,” he enthused, calling the Guangdong Family Planning Bureau one of the most forward-thinking provincial family-planning organizations in the country. Will sperm banks see an appreciable increase in donations as a result? Organizer Professor Zhu Jiaming points to the amount of media coverage as proof that it was “very successful.” And in terms of getting pictures of scantily clad women into newspapers, few could deny that.
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Wandering the Jinhan Exhibition Hall, which formerly housed the famous biannual Canton Fair, the first thing you notice about this sexpo is the complete absence of any sexiness. There are whips, chains, a lifelike latex German Shepherd mask if that’s your thing, a smorgasbord of unappetizing and surreal orifices for men, many bristling with “lifelike” hair (did they not get that memo?), equally larger-than-life phalluses (conversely, hairless) for women but where is the sex? It’s not just the unspoken vacuum crying out to be filled with pornography, but the complete lack of any erotic potential at all – there’s not even the whiff of a hook-up on offer.
That’s partly due to the demographic: as Professor Peng says, “Age-wise, usually the audience is at two extremes: the old and middle-aged, and the very young ones, like 20-something, many couples.” Most attendees skewed towards the former. Men (often to be seen craning their necks, standing on seats, and fighting for a good view) far outweighed women. If you were to handpick a crowd of candidates least likely to get laid in Guangzhou, it would look much the gathering assembled at the sexpo.
Which probably explains the need for so many products for what is supposed to be a natural act. To the lucky, sex is one of the few pleasures you shouldn’t have to pay for; to the many less fortunate, a financial outlay is required. The official list of products on offer at the Guangzhou sexpo included “sexy lingerie, footwear, S&M products, lubricants, disinfectants, nourishing foods and medicines, sex-function regulating appliances, adult appliances, traditional Chinese medicine products, health tea, health wine” and branched out into spheres such as reproduction (“birth control, IUD, technologies and products used to prevent reproductive tract infections, fertility treatments, maternal, health care products, massage equipment”) and the beauty industry (“breast enhancement products, body-sculpting products, slimming products, cosmetics, jewelry”).
Any business seeking to sell or buy “silicone, latex or rubber materials” comes to the Guangzhou Sex Culture Festival for their supply needs – if it could make you pregnant, potent or popular, you could find it or flog it there. Traditional Chinese Medicine stands offered buy-by-the-weight ginseng, deer antler, linghzimushrooms and ox penis while other companies sold well-packaged packets of “seadog essence,” (purported) real Viagra, “Shark Viagra” (“extraction of natural biological essence… sustained release of a substantial extension of time fox secretary” – only 10 yuan), African Man, USA Soldier and Chocolate Female Ecstacy powder (flying off the shelves to the over -60s). For entertainment, there were three cultural exhibitions, four science forums, five theatrical shows and, for reasons never explained, a 12 square-metre LED screen playing highlights from the Bolshoi Ballet’s recent production of Swan Lake at the Guangzhou Opera House.
Visitors could view a traditional array of Ming and Qing-era jade and stone carnal objects housed under Perspex cases that looked pretty antique themselves, or see a human body-art photography show with 50 pictures. Elsewhere were two centerpiece sculptures, one called Unlockable and one called Men’s Pridedepicting “a massive man’s root,” a sex quiz with the theme “You Happy? I Happy?,” a gala show entitled Happy Family, and a “high-level” show called Private Yoga, featuring the ageing TV presenter of Secret Garden, a cowboy-hatted senior consultant on marriage and family, and founder of something called “Private Yoga.” Then there was the inevitable qipao show (the qipao, say the organizers, embodies centuries of Chinese virtue and civilization, thus representing the pinnacle of female fashion), a bikini show and a lingerie show; early arrival at the latter was mandatory for anyone wanting a view.
“The sex toy industry in China, with more than 1,000 manufacturers, has been worth about $2 billion a year for the past few years,” the People’s Daily told its readers in 2010, adding that the largest market for these goods was South Africa which in that year took “almost twenty percent of the export market”; licentious America only bought two percent.
In Beijing alone, there are around 2,000 sex shops and around 200,000 nationwide. Just last month, “AiLu,” a little-known Chinese site selling sex accessories, aphrodisiacs and clothing raised $47.4 million in funding led by venture capitalist firm Shenzhen Capital and New Margin Ventures, according to finance site Ebrun.
The commercial opportunities are unquestionable, the demand apparently unquenchable. But the trade is completely unregulated: as with the food industry, no one can exactly be sure what they’re putting inside themselves. After visiting to a former primary school, now a dilapidated sex-toy factory in Zhejiang, a Global Times reporter concluded that “the government remains so embarrassed by the subject, it has failed to create appropriate standards to govern” the plastics and chemicals used in their production. “There is not a single regulation or standard for the manufacture and development of sex toys in China,” Su Weiguo, chairman of the China Council on the Science of Sex, told the newspaper.
Yet migrant workers should be encouraged to use adult toys, Zhang Feng, director of the Guangdong Family Planning Bureau, in 2009, announced at the seventh such sexpo. “The problem has never been openly acknowledged by the government or the public,” as the Southern Daily quoted Zhang. “If we apathetically ignore these sex-starved people, a rise in AIDS and other problems will be seen.” For a migrant worker, spending 30 yuan for a sexpo ticket and a further 120 yuan on a made-in-China vibrating penis-sheath represents a significant stake in his sex life. Should he have to risk some kind of toxic reaction to his investment as well?
Perhaps it’s simply a question of economics: society operates according to “concepts of ‘sexuality resource,’ in which the ‘resource’ is basically defined as ‘women,’” says Professor Peng. “The distribution of this resource is in accordance with that of wealth.” The richer customer, even if he has been unable to parlay his wealth into greater sexual opportunity, can literally purchase it in other ways – and even indulge in more recondite fetishes. A number of stalls, such as the Taizhou Mingqi Health Instrument Factory, sold high-end exotic goods, including life-like sex mannequins that do everything but talk; these drew among the largest crowds, although no one seemed to be actually buying.
Doll Sweet is a Japanese silicone-model company whose factory is in Dalian: they offer a flat-chested, dull-eyed child-doll that weighs nine kilos, with a height of 100 cm – about the size and shape of a three-year-old girl. Another doll, closely resembling a nine-year-old, is pictured splay-legged next to a teddy bear and costs only 11,800 yuan.
The company website insists the products are “NOT sex dolls” [sic] but rather “simulation dolls” who happen to have artificial vaginas. Still, there are certain things in life that are hard ever to explain away and owning an anatomically correct nine-year-old rubber girl must surely count as one. Doll Sweet’s Guangzhou salesman, manning the stall at the sexpo, was prepared to give it a go anyway: “She is short,” he admitted sweatily, “but you can imagine she is any age: 100 years old, 200 years old, it’s up to you.” But even he soon dropped the pretence: “Japanese like girls of a lower age, OK?” he snapped. “It’s a completely personal preference, like liking them fat, tall or thin. The Chinese like a doll that is lightweight and easy to operate.”
If the Chinese have any objection to Japan’s kinkier products, they are usually patriotic ones. Ning Kang, president of Wild One (“Tokyo, Hong Kong, Guangzhou”), made more than a dozen new wholesale clients last year and around five million yuan in revenue. But nationalistic fervor over the disputed Diaoyu Islands has dampened sales lately: “My online clients are afraid of being attacked by hackers,” Ning told me. “So they’ve been laying off our Japanese products.”
But no one at the sexpo seems to cared about any of that. For first-time visitors it was more of an eye-opener, though not necessarily the kind anyone wanted to talk about. Young couples shyly admitted they were “curious,” “here to browse,” “find out more” or “just looking,” before exiting the conversation as fast as possible. Then there was the migrant worker crowd: “their lower income means it’s very difficult for them to have relationships in the big cities they work in,” said Peng. “They jump on the opportunity, even just to have some fun and get a feast for the eyes.” For older visitors, Peng added, this can be a revelation: “I once overheard an old man next to me say, ‘I’ve just realized I’ve wasted my entire life!’”
Seasoned visitors were more sanguine, less easily impressed. “It was busier last time,” grumbled Mr Zhang, as he lunched with friends at a canteen in the exhibition hall. “They had two floors. Now it’s just one.” His companions, all farmers in their 50s, make the trip into town every year “because it’s fun.”
The official emphasis on sex education was really about keeping up appearances. The most popular draw of the day was a tame fashion parade featuring local underwear models. There was nothing on show that you couldn’t find on virtually any beach in China, but that did not deter hundreds of people from jamming the floor to snatch a glimpse. Right by the catwalk was a photography exhibition by the local department of health, with graphic close-up images of male and female genitalia displaying symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases. It was deserted.
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Professor Peng, vice secretary-general of the World Association of Chinese Sexologists, is a leading progressive in a fast-dying modern discipline. Something of a maverick anyway – his Weibo avatar shows him grinning broadly under a leather cowboy hat – his human-sexuality students at Wuhan’s Central China Normal University are forbidden to undertake the course as an independent degree, but must instead study it as a branch of zoology. As a consequence, the professor has only enrolled six in the last ten years (for three years from 2004 to 2007, he didn’t enroll any) and their job prospects in the field remain quite bleak. The Wuhan Evening News estimates over half a million sex-ed teachers are needed in China’s primary and middle schools. But no one seems to want to hire them.
The only major Chinese leader to ever give any backing to the concept of sex education was the late premier Zhou Enlai, whose schooling in Tianjin apparently equipped him with valuable knowledge of the subject. Zhou’s liberal views did not prevail at the time and when the Cultural Revolution arrived, “any discussion or activity related to sex was described as ‘bourgeois,’ ‘lustful’ and ‘decadent.’ Proposals for sex education were condemned… the publishers and authors of Knowledge of Sex [a rather conservative 1957 educational book] were criticized and attacked by the Red Guards and ‘revolutionary masses’,” wrote Fang Furuan in his book Sex in China.
This situation relaxed somewhat after 1980; classes finally were introduced to Shanghai in 1981, focusing primarily on family planning. By 1988, they had been deemed so successful that 6,000 schools across China had adopted them, leading the State Council to announce that they would shortly become part of the national curriculum.
But it was not to be. Even before 1989, the tension between “public morality” and social order had never relaxed; some posters for the Democracy Wall movement in 1978-9 made explicit calls for a relaxation of sexual attitudes, as did a few demonstrators during the student protests of 1987 and ’88. When the backlash came, sexual permissiveness was simply another Western pollutant to be stamped out. In 1990, the Supreme People’s Court vice-president, Lin Zun, tightened the law on pornography and prostitution: trafficking became a capital offence. A year prior, as the post-Tiananmen moral crusade swung into action, the government banned any form of prophylactic advertising: thus, the condom fell victim to a 1989 campaign aimed at products deemed “against the social norms and moral values of our country.” Despite having among the strictest family planning policies in the world, “the condom was defined as a ‘sex tool,’ even though its real purpose was to prevent pregnancy,” Professor Peng explained.
“The misunderstanding has a lot to do with the long-time restraint and vilification of sex in China… in the past 30 years since Reform and Opening-up, the wealth gap has widened… Laobaixing [regular folk] have less sexual resources so, of course, they are extremely against sex.”
The attitude is aptly illustrated in Fang Ruruan’s book with the story of Chen Shuhua, a 19-year-old student at Nanjing Art College who posed nude for classes in 1988. When Chen returned home, she immediately drew vilification from her neighbours, who accused her of prostitution and disgracing her village. The campaign eventually led to Chen’s suicide. Apart from the classic schism between provincial and cosmopolitan values,what seems most telling is the secret frustrations of the rural poor – denied access to perceived licentiousness they must, perforce, flail against it.
At the time, prominent painter Wu Zuoren said he was ashamed that such an event could happen in modern China. According to a September 2012 report from the Institute for Population and Development Studies, rural China still remains a cloistered world of prejudice, where unmarried men are the subject of mockery, while rape, incest, wife-sharing, unsafe illicit sex, human trafficking and “downlow” gay sex are all secretly practiced. By contrast, not a whiff of unwholesomeness is witnessed at the Guangzhou Sex Festival: even the most ribald products remained firmly oriented towards health and heterosexuality and, apart from one popular S&M stall, alternative sexualities were not catered for.
No such shame is attached in China to abortion clinics, which freely promote their wares: the government estimates that 13 million abortions are now carried out a year, often because out of ignorance, Chinese women use abortion as a form of contraception. (See for example, this Danwei summary of a newspaper story “Most Chinese women don’t know how to use contraceptives“.)
Hospitals boast of their no-frills terminations, starting from as little as 98 yuan, with many offering exclusive deals – bring your student ID for a half-price discount (see this example of such an ad). The official view seems to be that there’s nothing untoward about this: in fact, last year Xinhua described a National People’s Congress proposal to restrict the use of abortion advertising on television, radio and billboard as “an eye-popper.”
Prudish attitudes towards sex and continuing official ambivalence are deliberate, Peng believes. “Considering the increasing sexual deprivation of the greater public, the government has to maintain social security by promoting anti-sex attitudes – otherwise the fight for resources will intensify.”
Whether this sexual tension can be allowed to remain unresolved is another matter: for one thing, there is a danger of social instability. It is estimated that 24 million men (known as “bare branches” guanggun 光棍) in China now face a life of perpetual bachelorhood, due to gender imbalances. These men are mostly unemployed, often suffer from mental health issues and pass their time “drinking and fishing all day long,” according to ‘Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population’, a report based on research carried out in Shanxi and Jilin provinces in 2004 by V. Hudson V. and A.M. den Boer.
For another thing, there’s too much money to be made. Typical of the hundreds of professional buyers at the Guanzhou sexpo was Ms Zhu, a 30-year-old businesswoman paying her second visit to the fair. Last year, she came to learn about how foreign companies’ businesses worked by observing Brazilian models and comparing exhibitors’ wares and strategies. This year, she has come ready to make large lingerie purchases for her fledgling e-commerce business. Despite being a fully qualified roads engineer, she now wanted to be her own boss. “The economy is uncertain,” she explained. After working at a state-owned highway giant, her future in China seemed much safer in the sex industry.
Update: If there are lessons to be learned from the sexpo, perhaps one is to be careful how you use your newly purchased toy. Doctors in Shanghai recently removed a dildo from a 30-year-old man that “had somehow got stuck in his intestines” for five days. “There have been three similar cases so far this year,” Dr Yao Liqing complained to the Shanghai Daily in October, warning of the risk posed by dildo misuse. “People must use sex toys properly and avoid ones that are too big.” The dildo in question measured 23cm in length and 8cm in diameter.
The author Robert Foyle Hunwick can be reach on foylehunwick -at- gmail.com. His previous stories for Danwei include: Serial killers in China and Utopia website shutdown: interview with Fan Jinggang.
Links and sources
- Global Times: Sperm donor’s death in court, ‘Potential sex-ed profs stymied’, ‘Migrants hanker for happy endings’, ‘Sex Made in China’
- Xinkuai Net: 大学生和白领都来捐精吧!
- TIME: ‘Is China running out of sperm?’
- People’s Daily: ‘Nation becomes world’s biggest sex-toy producer’
- Tech in Asia: Chinese Sex Toys Site Nails Year’s Biggest E-Commerce Funding Round
- Danwei: ‘Most Chinese women don’t know how to use contraceptives’, Abortion adverts come to a college campus, Chinese sociologist Lі Уіnhe on rural problems, Li Yinhe on Sohu sex survey, Group sex and the Cultural Revolution – a translation
- Shanghaiist: Made in China deal: Half off abortions with your student ID
- China Daily: Hospital offers students 50% off abortion cost
- Weibo: 彭晓辉
- Asian Correspondent: ‘China investigates Red Cross hospitals’
- All China Women’s Federation: ‘Misleading abortion ads flood Jiangxi colleges’
- Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality: ‘The predicament of bare branches sexuality’ (Institute for Population and Development Studies)
- Hudson, V. and A.M. den Boer. Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (The MIT Press, 2004)
- Fang Furuan, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture (Plenum Press, 1991)
- Richard Burger, Behind the Red Door: Sex in China (Earnshaw Books, 2012)
