Hot Asian Action

(I imagine I'll get more traffic now!)

This article is funny - now that the party has stopped picking mates for people, the Chinese are suddenly discovering the joys of free love:

Li Li has lost exact count of how many men she has bedded, but she knows the number is far above 100. "I don't keep statistics," says the former journalist, 27. But she isn't averse to kissing and telling. For the past couple of years, Li has kept a blog--written under the pen name Muzi Mei--that has chronicled everything from her penchant for orgies and Internet dating to her skepticism toward marriage when it means staying faithful to one man....

Freedom in the bedroom is a novel concept in China, where for decades communist minders dictated most aspects of people's private lives. Dressed in baggy Mao suits--hardly outfits to set the pulse racing--citizens of the People's Republic had to ask permission from local officials on everything from whom to marry to what kind of birth control to use. But these days many Chinese are walking on the wilder side....

But China's sexual revolution has also brought unpleasant side effects. Although sex education is supposedly mandatory in Chinese middle schools, "many older teachers are too embarrassed, so they tear out the pages about sex from the textbooks," says Hu Peicheng, secretary-general of the China Sexology Association in Beijing. With little knowledge of birth control, an increasing number of unmarried women are getting pregnant in a culture in which single motherhood is still taboo. A survey by Shanghai medical researcher Yan Fengting found that 65% of urban women undergoing abortions in 2004 were single, compared with just 25% in 1999. Rates of sexually transmitted diseases are skyrocketing too, with HIV infections growing most quickly among Chinese 15 to 24 years old. Brothels barely disguised as beauty salons crowd the streets of China's big cities, while certain suburbs are known as "concubine villages" because of their high concentration of mistresses.

China and India have thus far managed to avoid pandemic-style outbreaks of HIV. Unfortunately, in both countries rates of infection are on the rise. Fortunately, both countries are better prepared to deal with it than most African countries. Given that India already has a history of using generic drugs (which the US falsely calls "illegal") and China hardly has a history of respecting intellectual property, it easy to imagine both countries will respond to growing HIV rates by producing cheap anti-retroviral drugs.

Another note, which would be funny, but not in a ha-ha way:

Those extra temptations--which the communists largely eradicated after taking power in 1949--have wreaked havoc on marriages, with 1.6 million Chinese couples divorcing in 2004, a 21% rise from the year before, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. "Before in society, we had a sense of right and wrong," says the China Sexology Association's Hu. "Now, we can do whatever we want. But do we have any moral standards left?"

Great: The Republicans are coming to China.