China's film furor draws attention to changing mores

A controversy over too much skin points to the chasm dividing puritan official morality from the lives of real Chinese.

from the February 2, 2007 edition

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The problem is compounded by the fact that it is hard to talk about in China, where sex is a taboo subject for most adults.

Mr. Zhang, who burst onto the international film scene with "Hero," puts the scandal surrounding his latest movie down to this reticence. "Only because traditionally sex is a forbidden area to Chinese people is this aspect of the movie under discussion a lot now," he told the daily Metro Express.

"But young people today know a lot, and I don't think they will concentrate on those breasts," he added.

Young people do indeed know "a lot more than their parents think they know" says Zhang Meimei, a sex-education expert at Beijing's Capital Normal University.

"And as China has adopted Western economic and social reforms, people have begun to try learning from Western attitudes to sex," she adds. "Our job is to find a balance between traditional Chinese repression and overly open Western attitudes, to give the new generation clear guidelines on how to make their choices."

The main obstacles, says Dr. Zhang, "come from parents, who fear that knowledge about sex leads to practice, which would interfere with their childrens' studies."

Those fears are perhaps grounded. While "traditional Chinese attitudes to virginity are still very strong among parents, they are not so strong among kids anymore," Zhang says.

A lot more has changed over the past two decades, points out Jing. China's divorce rate has almost tripled since 1980; in a country where prostitution was virtually unknown 25 years ago some 4 million women prostitute themselves today, according to some estimates. Many of them are among the 1.18 million registered drug addicts – a fraction of the real number of addicts.

"All this adds up," says Jing. "You reflect on the figures and you know this society is experiencing a lot."

Official morality has not kept pace with those experiences. If the well-filled bodices in "Curse of the Golden Flower" seem daring to Chinese eyes it is because China has no film ratings system: everything shown is meant to be acceptable to youngsters.

"The time is not ripe for China to institute a ratings system," says Yin Hong, a film critic and deputy head of Tsinghua University's Journalism School.

Partly that is because of the difficulty of agreeing on where the lines should be drawn for different categories of film. But mainly it is because a ratings system would permit at least some films to use explicit language and nudity, and those are simply beyond the official pale.

The fuss surrounding Zhang Yimou's latest film does not surprise Zhang Meimei, the sex educator. "It's a typical example of traditional Chinese concepts bumping up against Western ideas of freedom," she says.

"But I don't think it will lead to anything negative," she adds. "At least people are talking about these questions publicly for once. That's better than silence."

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