A slap in the face

The young listener said that he and his girlfriend had experimented sexually the month before, but "both of us wore underwear." He wanted to know what to do. "What if she's pregnant?" he asked. "Will her life be in danger if we have an abortion? Which hospital can guarantee a successful abortion?"...

Adults now in their fifties would have been teenagers during the Cultural Revolution, a time of such puritan attitudes that couples rarely held hands in public. Openness about sex was already considered bourgeois by the Communist Party, which came to power in 1949 battling Western influence and the corrupt excesses of the ruling Nationalist Party. Under the Communists, the smallest romantic gestures could lead to a person's being labeled a "bad element," subject to persecution along with rich peasants, landowners and counterrevolutionaries.

"It was a very cold time. You did your romance in darkness, in secret," said He Guanghu, a Renmin University professor who was 16 when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. By the time it ended a decade later, a generation of young people had lost not only their chance for an education, but also the ability to speak openly about love and sex and display the emotions of a loving marriage.

Even today there are limits. "We cannot say too much in the radio program and should be careful how we speak, in case some listeners appeal to higher authorities to cancel the show," said Wu, who has co-hosted "Tonight's Whisperings" for eight years...

"Sex education in China does exist, but it's useless," said Zhang Yinmo, author of a best-selling book about high school sex and adolescent yearning. "They stand there and tell the students to read it themselves, or they tell them to study it at home."

The most common form of sex education today is a 45-minute class offered just once, in the middle of a physical hygiene course, in the second year of middle school. Most teachers are too embarrassed to discuss this chapter in the course textbook, which identifies body functions, periods and wet dreams, experts said...

One boy told Zhang he was in elementary school when his mother slapped him after he accompanied her to a museum exhibit and asked what a penis was. Back home, his mother demanded, "How can you get married if you act like a hooligan at so young an age?"

"The most important thing is Chinese traditional ideas about sex," Wu said. "You cannot tell exactly what sex is. And that is exactly what the students want to know. China used to hide this subject under the table. They considered it dirty, and changing attitudes takes a long time."...

High school and college students in urban China increasingly accept premarital sex, surveys show. While the majority remain more conservative than their peers in more developed countries, Chinese students are having both sex and abortions at increasingly younger ages.

Now, at the close of summer -- after holidays that gave female students time to see their boyfriends -- gynecologists say they expect to see a rise in the number of unwanted pregnancies. And many of those girls and young women will seek abortions.

Some experts attribute that to widespread advertising describing abortions as cheap and painless. Only hospitals are allowed to prescribe the RU-486 abortion pill, but it is easily obtained from illegal clinics for about $15.