China is opening up

In the studios of Capital Life Radio's No 1 rated show, Tonight's Whisperings, the co-host leaned in close to the microphone.

"Tonight we're going to talk about love and sex," Sun Yan said in a deep voice, launching into a text message sent in by a student.

The young listener said that he and his girlfriend had experimented sexually the month before. He wanted to know what to do.

"What if she's pregnant?" he asked. "Will her life be in danger if we have an abortion? Which hospital can guarantee a successful abortion?"

Sun's co-host, the author and lecturer Wu Ruomei, explained patiently that the girlfriend was unlikely to be pregnant but also issued a warning. Experimentation should be avoided, she said, because it could lead to sex.

The exchange kicked off an hour and a half of discussion on a subject that is still taboo in much of China, even as magazines, music videos and the internet increasingly promote sex to the country's trend-conscious youth.

Adults, many of whom came of age during the ideologically driven Cultural Revolution, have struggled to keep up. The result is a growing gap between how teens behave and what older generations are doing to educate them.

Tonight's Whisperings targets college students but enlightens thousands of teenagers who are hard-pressed to find answers to their questions elsewhere.

It also worries anxious, tradition-bound parents who believe too much information about sex will corrupt their children.

Adults now in their 50s would have been teenagers during the Cultural Revolution, a time of such puritan attitudes that couples rarely held hands in public.

Openness about sex was already considered bourgeois by the Communist Party, which came to power in 1949 battling Western influence and the corrupt excesses of the ruling Nationalist Party.

Under the Communists, the smallest romantic gestures could lead to a person's being labelled a "bad element" and subject to persecution.

Even today there are limits. "We cannot say too much in the radio programme and should be careful how we speak, in case some listeners appeal to higher authorities to cancel the show," said Wu, who has co-hosted Tonight's Whisperings for eight years.

Most of the queries come by e-mail or text message from listeners who want to avoid being overheard by parents or roommates.

On a recent Friday, there were questions about sexual harassment and feelings for those of the same sex.

"Sex education in China does exist, but it's useless," said Zhang Yinmo, author of a best-selling book about high school sex and adolescent yearning. "They stand there and tell the students to read it themselves, or they tell them to study it at home."

The most common form of sex education today is a 45-minute class offered just once, in the middle of a physical hygiene course, in the second year of middle school. Most teachers are too embarrassed to discuss this chapter in the course textbook, experts said.

But attitudes are changing. "Twenty years ago, if you looked at a guy or a girl for more than 20 seconds, you would be judged as sick," said Liu, 18. "Now, more and more kids hold hands and kiss in public."

Sensitive topic

In some schools, sex education is taught several times a year. "Different districts have different textbooks. Sex education is a comparatively sensitive topic, and it's still in a pilot phase," said Xu Zhenlei, vice secretary of the China Sexology Association, a group of academics that advises government officials.

"Generally speaking, most parents are against sex education. If you're talking about sex education that says, 'Don't date and focus on your studies,' of course they support that."

When Wu, the radio co-host, first volunteered to lecture in schools in 1992, she was often rejected immediately.

She now speaks at about 50 schools a year. "The people in the Education Ministry are already more open than they were 10 years ago," she said. "But they still can't keep up with what students need."

Zhang's second book, Roses Hidden in a Book Bag, published in 2004, is full of stories of high school students having unprotected sex and parents unable or unwilling to discuss the issue.

The students featured in her first book were born in the early 1980s, and they prized their virginity and worried that too much sex was harmful.

"The most important thing is Chinese traditional ideas about sex," Wu said. "They considered it dirty, and changing attitudes takes a long time."

In the absence of frank discussion, teenagers turn to the internet or easy-to-find adult videos. Most of the 600,000 registered users of the sites in a large online pornography case were juveniles, prosecutors in Shaanxi province said.

High school and college students in urban China increasingly accept premarital sex, surveys show. While the majority remain more conservative than their peers in more developed countries, Chinese students are having both sex and abortions at increasingly younger ages.

There is widespread advertising describing abortions as cheap and painless. Only hospitals are allowed to prescribe the RU-486 abortion pill, but it is easily obtained from illegal clinics for about $15.

Girls are too embarrassed to buy condoms and worry that carrying them will ruin their reputations, said Su, a high school student.

"For kids our age, dating is just for having fun. It has nothing to do with love. You should have sex and talk about love when you're older, when you have a stable life, a job, a salary, when you understand everything," she said. "I'm too young, I know that."