|
|
Sex education in modern and contemporary China: interrupted debates across the last century
| Since the late 1980s sex education has been widely promoted in the People’s Republic of China, but this is not the first time in China’s modern history that attempts to develop sex education have been made. This paper maps out the development of sex education debates over the last century, identifying the historical, political and social contexts in which they originated and developed. It looks at contemporary sex education as part of a fragmented historical trajectory characterised by thematic and ideological continuities as well as interruptions, in which the young healthy body and mind becomes a crucial component of national modernity and national strength. This paper interprets sex education as a ‘discursive mechanism’ which has been implemented through the production of knowledge in fragmented fashion since the early Republican period to the present, constructing a conceptual link between national strength, national modernisation, the healthy body and people’s sexual knowledge and conduct.
|
|
