Premarital sex is common, survey finds
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E-mail China Daily, April 10, 2012
In the online survey, 86.5 percent of respondents said they had premarital sex, 15.1 percentage points higher than in the print survey.
Li Yinhe, a sexologist who conducted the 1989 survey about premarital sex in China, said an increase in premarital sex was inevitable.
"First, the purpose of sex has changed. Giving birth is no longer the sole valid reason. Second, there is a strong desire for sex from adolescence, before people reach marriageable age, and adolescence tends to begin earlier nowadays," Li said. "Also, when the crime of 'hooliganism' was removed from the Criminal Law in 1997, sex out of wedlock went from being a crime to just a personal choice.
"Sexual desire doesn't have anything to do with morality, but sexual behavior does," Li said. "A married person who has sex outside the marriage without the spouse's approval violates the vow of loyalty."
However, Du Juan, a researcher at the Institute of Sexuality and Gender at Renmin University of China, doubted that the new survey's data on premarital sex represented the situation in Chinese society as a whole. "We shouldn't believe everything that statistics tells us."
But researchers at the institute have concluded from their own national surveys that "the sexual revolution in China has succeeded," she said.
On the other hand, abstinence is also a personal choice, Du said. "People need to follow their own will in choosing for or against abstinence. You don't choose abstinence or sex because it's fashionable."
Speaking on whether a more open-minded view of sex would affect the stability of relationships, Du said: "The development of a modern society has weakened many functions that were thought to be served only by marriages. Sex is absolutely not the only thing to blame when couples and families split up."
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