China Digital Times

Stories tagged with: Li Yinhe (7)

• Part Girl, Part Boy And Proud - Jonathan Ansfield

  

  CDT’s Jonathan Ansfield wrote the following for his Biganzi column:

  Boyish Supergirl Li Yuchun made androgyny a sexy subject in China. Celeb social critics Li Yinhe and Yu Dan, plenty butch in their own right, helped to affirm the trend. Never mind that for women in Mao’s time, gender ambiguity was the rule. Today it’s the rage.

  Now a new survey lends evidence to suggest that it’s a growing psychological phenomenon. In a poll of 800 female students from universities around Shanghai, released there last week at an academic forum on women’s issues, 31.5 percent identified themselves as part-male, part-female in temperament, Shanghai’s Wenhui Bao reported. Compared to a similar study of women born in the seventies that was conducted in 1998, about twice as many of the eighties generation (80Âêé) were designated androgynous (shuangxinghuaÂèåÊÄßÂåñ; the formal term is cixiong tongti ÈõåÈõÑÂêå‰Ωì)

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  • November 4, 2007 5:54 PM

• Only 2.2 pc Chinese women derive happiness from sex! - ANI

  

  From Asia Pacific News.Net:

  Only about 2.2 percent of women in China consider sex as the most valuable factor to make them happy, a recent survey has found. About 22.5 percent of the women surveyed prioritized love as the big happiness maker, because the word ’sex’ was still considered as a taboo.

  Notably, the factor of “self-fulfillment” ranked highest for the Chinese women to make them happy, as more than 60 percent of the respondents voted for it.

  Citing a reason for a low percentage of women linking their happiness to sex, a leading sexologist in the country said that traditionally the word ’sex’ carried negative meanings. “The word was stereotyped with negative meanings. A good woman should not like sex. Love is a beautiful word,” said Li Yinhe, a noted sexologist and professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. [Full Text]

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  • March 30, 2007 8:49 PM

• Li Yinhe Launches Free Speech Debate - David Bandurski

  

  The China Media Project provides a fine summary of the free speech debate that flared up on the editorial pages of Chinese newspapers following yesterday’s announcement by noted sexologist Li Yinhe that she is being pressured to keep her mouth shut on matters carnal.

  CMP translates comments from a number of papers, including this from Southern Metropolitan Daily:

  Clearly, if Li Yinhe’s voice can be so easily suppressed then the interests and right to speak of all those who curse her [for her views] will be difficult to safeguard, and the voices they wish to hear might suffer similarly.

  Protecting freedom of expression necessarily means we will have to hear some voices we don’t particularly like. This is a necessary price to be paid for freedom. If we must choose between “hearing both those voices we like and those we don’t” and “hearing absolutely nothing”, we should opt for the former. [Full Text]
  
  

  
  
  Li gained nationwide fame in 2005 when she suggested at the Guangzhou Sex Expo that more Chinese engage in wife-swapping.

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  • February 15, 2007 8:36 PM

• Controversial Sexologist Backs Down Sex Talk - Jessie Tao

  

  From China Daily:

  Li Yinhe, a noted sexologist and professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), who is expected to propose for a fourth time that gay marriage be legalized in China at this year’s Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) of which she is a member, just wrote in her personal blog about her decision to refrain from interviews and talk about sex because of pressure from above.

  “… My leaders [at CASS], under pressure from “non-average people,” would like me to shut up. …So starting now, I have decided, for a while (maybe for the rest of my life): 1. to accept as few press interviews as possible; 2. to talk about sex as little as possible,” Li wrote in an update entitled “My latest decision”….[Full Text]

  -Read also Li Yinhe fires back by Shanghaiist.
  
  -Related Chinese source here via 163.net.
  
  -Previous posts about Li Yinhe via CDT.
  
  (Photo from Shanghaiist)

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  • February 14, 2007 9:24 PM

• China sex experts draw the line at wife-swapping - Reuters

  

  China’s sexual revolution apparently has its limits, even in Guangzhou. From Reuters:

  Chinese sociologists said that the country should promote bolder attitudes toward sex, but that wife-swapping was off the agenda, state media reported Monday.

  Chinese attitudes toward sex have relaxed in recent decades, triggering a boom in extramarital relationships which the Communist Party has blamed on bourgeois mores imported from the West.

  “Wife-swapping should not be promoted to the public as it will lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases,” the China Daily quoted Zhang Feng, a family planning official, as saying at the fourth Guangzhou Sex Culture Expo at the weekend. [Full Text]
  
  

  The comments were a response to a suggestion from prominent female sociologist and popular sex expert Li Yinhe at last year’s Sex Expo that wife-swapping was a legitimate form of entertainment. So far the story only seems to be running on state-run media.

  Technorati Tags: China, Guangzhou

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  • November 6, 2006 9:25 AM

• Photo Series: A Red-light District in China

  

  Text from Global Voices Online and pictures from Fengniao:

  …In the time since mainland China implemented reforms, women in impoverished regions have escaped poverty by means of prostitution, and in those places there has appeared a situation of ’smile at poverty but not at prostitutes’. This reflects women’s low status, a decline in women’s moral standards and a decline in societal moral standards as well. This kind of phenomenon is of the same nature as the issue of women becoming “gold digger” wives; all involve the behavior of women selling sex as a commodity. Only the former (sex workers) are short-term, with multiple retail, while the latter (full-time wives) are long-term, with one-time wholesale. If legal means are used to sanction, to only sanction the former but not the latter is illogical, and nobody would support a stance which would see legal sanctions being put on the former….

  Click to see the original post: The Legal and Moral Problems With Sex Work by Li Yinhe, translated by Global Voices Online (need to scroll down).

  The police cracking down a Red-light district in Kunming (from Fengniao):
  
  

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  • October 21, 2006 6:05 PM

• China’s “comment posting culture”, free speech and the Li Yinhe controversy - David Bandurski

  

  From China Media Project:

  As the latest public personality in China to be verbally attacked en masse by web users and become a media hot topic, sociologist Li Yinhe (李银河, blog ) is feeling the force of creeping social change in the country. She is playing an unenviable role, you might say, in the dress rehearsal for free speech in China, the revolutionary idea that all Chinese have the right to speak their own mind and make their own decisions about what is truth.

  On July 21 Li Yinhe, a sociologist and well-known expert on sex and gender (who proposed for a third time this year that gay marriage be legalized in China), presented a talk in Nanjing in which she reportedly discussed everything from one-night stands to incest. Nanjing’s Jinling Evening News ran what most now agree was a news report with a negative spin on July 23, and suggested Li had said in her talk that she had a “desire for multiple romantic relationships” (Li later told Y Weekend her words had been taken out of context, that she was expressing not a personal wish but rather a hope for social diversity). [Full Text]

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  • August 15, 2006 8:56 AM