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China spurns sexual revolution on campus
Beijing's education bureaucrats say "no sex, please, we're
communists".
October 13, 2004
China's Education Ministry is trying to force the country's 9 million
university students to live in closely supervised dormitories, in a move to
head off a wave of premarital sex.
At the same time, universities have installed cameras in classrooms and other
likely places for after-hours trysts by student couples. Even kisses and
embraces bring expulsion.
But the drive against student sex - Canute-like against the country's rapidly
liberalising attitude to love affairs and the growing use of sexual images in
media - is bringing unusually strong criticism from commentators and social
analysts.
The latest case to set off an uproar involves two third-year university
students in the western city of Chengdu, who were noticed on a closed-circuit
TV monitor lying together on the floor of a classroom one evening and kissing.
The college said they had committed "an illegal sexual act" and "intimate
physical touches based on sexual desire" and expelled them last month. It stood
by the decision even after the girl provided a medical certificate that she was
still a virgin, Chinese media reported.
The expulsion was slated by Ye Xingping, head of the law college at Shenzhen
University as "somewhat outrageous" from a legal perspective.
"I don't think it is appropriate to supervise students with video cameras
installed in classrooms," Professor Ye said.
"That means you don't trust the students. That is not right. A school
administration should respect students' basic rights."
Zhang Heping, a "sex culture expert", said it was extreme to expel the
students. "It is understandable that young people become passionate when they
are in love," Mr Zhang said. "But it is of course inappropriate if they lose
control of themselves and go beyond hugging and kissing, because that would be
hazardous to public order."
The Education Ministry has told universities and colleges to house students on
campus when possible, rather than letting them rent elsewhere.
Dormitories at Chinese universities are cheap but are notorious for their
squalor. In most of them, students sleep four or six to a room in separate male
and female blocks, and a "lights-out" policy is enforced well before midnight.
Campus gates and dormitory entrances are usually guarded.
Many students say the crowded dormitories are unsuited for study and create
enormous tensions. In one noted case this year, a student at Yunnan University
hacked four room-mates to death over a disputed card game.
The ruling Communist Party has tended to blame any kind of promiscuity on
"liberal bourgeois mores imported from the West".
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