By Nathan Schweizer
Sex education remains lacking despite China's recent sexual revolution.
(Ecns.cn)--"Mom, my teacher told me that shaking hands, kissing, and hugging can give you AIDS. Is that true?" Although three years now separate Jin Wei, a professor at the Party School of Central Committee of CPC, from her daughter's childlike query, she still remembers the incident clearly. "At Beijing's Zhongguancun, an area that possesses some of the county's best educational resources, secondary schools still hadn't developed any sort of sex education program and even the most basic AIDS awareness information had been taught incorrectly." Jin, who teaches AIDS education for party personnel, was understandably concerned.
Unfortunately, although China's education system as a whole has made significant improvements over the last thirty years, with many top universities beginning to challenge schools in the US and elsewhere as producers of first-rate professionals and businessmen, sexual education still lags behind significantly. And, with the rapid rise in AIDS transmission rates seen over the last several years, as well as the shift from transmission from mother to child to transmission primarily via sexual activity, the problem represented by China's sexual education has become progressively more difficult to avoid.
Adolescence education
Sex education has always represented something of an awkward topic in China. Although it saw early interest from a number of Communist Party leaders (such as Zhou Enlai, who became impressed with the issue during his time studying at Tianjin's Nankai University), the topic was left dormant during the Cultural Revolution and it wasn't until the 1982 publishing of Sexual Education by Wu Jieping that the topic received any sort of significant attention. Although a pilot program was initiated in 1982 by the Beijing city government, support for such programs was hampered by official bashfulness over the topic and by 1996 Beijing's schools were still using the same text that had been produced as a "test edition" by one of the program's teachers some 14 years before.
In fact, so great was official sheepishness over the topic that, according to Xu Zhenlei, head secretary at the China Sexology Association, as late as 1980 not a single official document existed that contained the term 'sexual education.' "At that time no one dared directly mention sexual education, and so 'adolescence education' became a euphemism for sexual education." And, when 'adolescence education' was taught, it frequently provided little, if any, real sexual education, with the 1996 Adolescence Health Education, for example, containing only a single line on the topic.
