I was thinking the other day about how fantastic a place China is to live in and why it took me until my 50th birthday to get here. The thing that got me started thinking about this was the fact I teach university students and the young women in my class are all drop dead gorgeous. I thought if only I where 25 years younger! Don't get me wrong I'm a very happily married man with no intentions of straying but what would I have found if I'd come here in the early 80's:-
DECADES ago, in the era of the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976), love and marriage bore a heavy political burden; the little red book (Quotations of Chairman Mao) was presented in place of a wedding band, or generally served as a token of love and engagement. Imagine how outlandish it seems to young people today to read love letters that pine: "I hope you can arrange your work, study and life well, so as to sustain your ideals and revolutionary zeal, and not degrade into an uncouth and lowly person."[ Sounds like my early EMF's !!!!] But such sentiments were typical 40 years ago in decent young men and women, who often delivered revolutionary pep talks instead of whispering "sweet nothings."
The 1980s and 1990s: Secret and Illicit Loves
The movie Love on Lushan Mountain in 1980 [ think more like Doris Day than Debbie does Dallas] broke the taboo against kissing that arose during the "cultural revolution." The scene rekindled the nation's passion for liberty in affairs of the heart, and the first to jump on the bandwagon were the college students, who worshipped love as the point of existence. Though courting on campus was still forbidden at the time, many students conducted romances under the radar, finding reasons to study together and hiding their love letters in books. When night fell, they stole out to find quiet and private spots for their trysts.
The Marriage Law was revised for the first time in 1980, and certain legal requirements for divorce were dropped. Correspondingly, beginning in the 1980s, China's divorce rate continued to climb – from 341,000 pairs in 1980, to 800,000 pairs in 1990, and to 1.2 million pairs in 2000, according to Professor Wu Changzhen. Though people had more freedom to legally split from a spouse, ethical adjudication still held sway at the time. Professor Wu cited a case he came across where a teacher had a long-term extramarital affair going and appealed eight times to the local court for a divorce; each time he was rejected for "lack of evidence proving the emotional breakdown of the couple."
In 1983, China enacted the first marriage law that dealt with Chinese-foreign couples. At the time many people resorted to unions as a way to go abroad, and most cases involved young Chinese women and much older foreign men. "An age difference of 25 years was commonplace," recalled Zhao Xiuying, who worked for 22 years as a clerk at the Chinese-foreign marriage registration office of the Shanghai Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau.
In 1977 when Shanghai came across its first case of international marriage registration, the local civil affairs bureau rejected it until Deng Xiaoping personally intervened. Only a year later the city registered 148 Chinese-foreign marriages, and the figure has topped itself every year since. The registration process was very complicated then, requiring approvals from different government departments, and even references from the workplace and neighborhood committee of the Chinese applicant. It usually took a month before any couple was awarded their marriage license.
New Millennium: Tolerance and Privacy
Sociologist Li Yinhe considers the period from the late 1990s to the early 21st century a watershed in love and marriage, a time when the Chinese experienced a social revolution that included attitudes toward sex. Courting and emotional attachment came out of the closet, and the Internet played a significant role in the process. An extensive marriage survey was conducted between 1996 and 2000 by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences involving 800 couples in Shanghai, Gansu, Guangzhou and Heilongjiang. Results told the tale that 3 out of 4 married couples tied the knot within half a year of dating. In 2007 students from the School of Psychology of Beijing Normal University conducted street intercept interviews in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and found that 10 percent of the 1,204 married respondents got to know their spouse through Internet chatrooms.
In this period, dating on campus became common, and premarital sex was tolerated. In 2008, the Shanghai Andrology Research Institute questioned 5,234 students in 14 colleges and universities in the city. More than half of them had dated; 81.4 percent declared they were not against premarital sex; and 20.2 percent of men and 10 percent of women admitted they had engaged in sex.
Love and marriage became increasingly a private matter, reflected by changing marriage registration procedures. Before 2003, all marriages and divorces had to obtain a letter of certification from the applicants' workplace or neighborhood committee. Today, only a residence booklet and ID card are required for a marriage license, and an additional certificate gets you a divorce. The registration process in both cases takes no more than 20 minutes.
In the 1990s, keeping a mistress became vogue for "successful" men. The 2001 Marriage Law Amendment increased the amount of compensation that could be demanded by the wronged party in a divorce case. "Adulterers are penalized both financially and legally (cheating is grounds for divorce), but denial of a divorce suit is not an option regardless of who is wronged and how, as it inflicts pain on both sides," explained Professor Wu Changzhen. He concluded that the Marriage Law evolved to become more humane over the decades, "leaving legal matters to law, and ethical issues to ethics," as he put it.
The phenomenon of May-December unions with foreigners also changed in the late 1990s. In most cases, the age difference was within a normal range; both the spouses tended to be well educated; more Chinese men began to marry foreign women; and an increasing number of couples chose to reside in China after their nuptials. By 1994, annual international marriages hit a plateau at about 3,000 pairs. Meanwhile, divorce cases started to climb again. Still, the conventional Chinese mind places the family above romantic love. An exploration of changing values in Guangzhou, based on surveys from 1990 to 2008, showed the primacy of family harmony was upheld by a constant majority of more than 90 percent, while the rating of romantic love continued to decline, ranking 11th, a rank lower than "money" and "career development."
Professor Yue Guo'an of Nankai University holds that satisfaction with the quality of the Chinese marriage is at the upper end of the scale. The previously mentioned Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences study (1996-2000) backed that assessment: 22 percent of the respondents described their marriage quality as low; 75 percent, medium; and 3 percent claimed to have that elusive high-quality, perfect union.
The same survey also showed that most marriages were stable however, even if, in most cases, not anchored in romantic love. More often than not, Chinese couples are more devoted to their children than their spouse, and take less time indulging themselves than they do their offspring. Nearly half of the respondents considered sex "of average importance" in their marriage, while 26.2 percent rated it as "relatively important," and 8 percent as "very important." Though 49.4 percent went on record as being satisfied with their intimacy in bed, more than one-third of the respondents confessed they did not exchange endearments or engage in erotic play with their spouse at other times.
This is the link to the full article
http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/ctenglish/se/txt/2009-09/28/content_220425.htmI think today we have an easy time of it really, to think in 1977 the head of the Party had to be involved!!!!!
