Both Edgar Snow and Felix Greene, American and Canadian observers respectively, speak of the sex practices of the Chinese and the attitudes they reflect. There is, on the one hand, a new equality of women, and on the other, a discouragement of premarital or extramarital sex. The care and education of children are given the highest priority, and in part the freedom of women to compete fully with men in field, office, and profession is compensated for by opportunities for communal care of children. Marriage in China is easy, while divorce, although granted "on demand," seems to be restricted by custom. Young people are encouraged to delay marriage; yet it appears that young marriages are not uncommon. Birth control information and materials are widely and easily available; in the back country, Edgar Snow says, there has been much resistance to their use. An item in the New York Times (March 20, 1970) datelined Hong Kong, attributes to visitors from Canton the statement that contraceptive pills, evidently made in China, are being sold there in the towns and villages.

In China as in the Soviet Union, in contrast with the West, there is none of the almost constant sexual stimulation we grow up with and become used to in the theater, in the movies, on television, and in advertising in all its pervading forms. Felix Greene on this subject:

“China is today an intensely, almost compulsively "moral" society. In the one exception, two cases were cited, both involving parents who were under the legal marriage age (twenty for boys and eighteen for girls). Both cases were resolved in the same way: by court orders permitting early marriage, "in the interest of the child."

An anonymous article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine for June 1, 1969, written by "a Westerner now resident in Peking," gives some further details. Late marriage is advocated, at the age of twenty eight to thirty for men and a few years younger for women; but these suggestions are often ignored without penalty. The marriage procedure takes five minutes in the municipal registrar's office and "is very seldom denied to those who wish to avail themselves of it." This observer reports that unmarried young men and women are usually chaste, but when he says that "puritanism is the hallmark of Chinese society" he is using the word in a sense different from ours. He notes that men and women wear identical clothing in winter and that otherwise women may use a little color but avoids jewelry even on festive occasions, and never uses perfume. The press complains of the spreading, presumably Western, disease of "falling in love." According to this same account, however, young couples can be seen together in parks and secluded places; and although there is little ostentatious flirtation, there is much gaiety and liveliness, and little shyness or timidity.

But we need not assume that a state of perfection has been achieved in China, which has had its share of turbulence in recent years. Another New York Times news item, datelined Hong Kong, August 22, 1970, offers the information that in Canton, which had become "virtually a vice free city" during the Communist regime, there has been a return of prostitution since 1966 in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. It appears that city girls who had been sent into the countryside had been coerced into having sexual intercourse with peasant farmers and sometimes forced to marry them. Some of the girls subsequently escaped and returned to the city; but lacking residence permits or ration cards, they turned to prostitution as a means of livelihood. The news item concludes by noting that stringent control measures were being instituted, with emphasis on prevention of marriage without consent. Although punishment is mentioned, it appears to be directed against the men rather than the girls. Chinese "puritanism" does not seem to be based on original sin.