A meeting with China’s most famous sexologist

December 12, 2009

Beijing

I spent Saturday morning trying to write up the story from Harbin, but failed to finish. Saw Adam Dean, who is now accredited as the Telegraph’s photographer, for lunch near the Drum Tower. David Eimer, another Telegraph journalist, had introduced me to a Guizhou restaurant only a couple of months ago, so we headed there only to discover that it has since transformed itself into a Sichuan “dry” hot pot place where they pour a range of hot ingredients into a large bowl and mix in the Mala – or Sichuan peppers and chillis.

We then visited Li Yinhe, the sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has broken endless ground with her work on China’s sexual revolution. Or at least I think she has. Since none of her work is available in English, we had not read any of it, and consequently the interview was vaguer than it should have been.

Li’s husband, the novelist Wang Xiaobo, died over 10 years ago and she lives quietly in an apartment in a remote suburb. Pictures of her grandchildren are on her mantelpiece opposite a print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. On the floor sat a pair of happy pig statues.

Over her career, Li has repeatedly called for China to modernise its laws regarding pornography and sexual behaviour. We’re lucky to get the interview. A couple of years ago, a weary Li said she was feeling tired of talking about her studies. Although she said senior officials no longer regard her work as politically sensitive, she was still under pressure to maintain decorum. She said she was going to stop publishing sex-related papers and speaking to the press.

She answered our questions briefly and efficiently, but we never really connected properly. Understandably, she came across as either guarded or just bored of our ignorance. The interview didn’t throw up much that we didn’t know already, although she did tell us about her latest project.

She is studying families in five cities across China, from Harbin to Guangzhou, and how their family structure fits together. She said she had been expecting to discover that China was becoming more Western as it develops and that the traditional Confucian obligations between children and their parents were breaking down, to leave couples as the main nucleus of a family. But in fact, she said, the bonds between fathers and sons, or mothers and daughters, remains tight and the family unit spends a lot of time together still.

Oddly, she also found few regional differences in family behaviour between north and south, although she did say that while most families in China have either a dominant husband or an equally-matched husband and wife, the situation in Harbin was different. Up north, either the husband is dominant, or the wife is dominant, but the two are rarely evenly-matched, she said. “They have strong characters,” she smiled.

2009年12月12日

北京

周六早上，我开始写哈尔滨无煤村的报道，但没能完成。中午和Adam Dean在鼓楼碰头吃饭，他现在已经是每日电讯的专职摄影师了。David Eimer，我们的另一位记者，几个月前带我去了鼓楼附近的一家贵州菜，回味三日，所以这次还是朝着那家奔去。结果门面没换，菜却变成了川系的麻辣干锅，就是将各色热食放进一个大锅，用没麻辣炒拌。

饭后，我们去了李银河家。李是社科院的社会学专家，在性发展的领域有很多惊人之作，至少我这么认为的。李的作品都没有英文译本，我们了解感受不深，所以采访也相对的大致含糊，很是可惜。

李银河的丈夫王小波已过世十年多，李一直在北京边郊的公寓里过着平静的生活。屋里的壁炉台上摆放着她孙辈的照片，对面的墙上挂着一幅梵高的向日葵。地板上立着一对欢喜猪的雕塑。

在她的职业生涯里，李银河一直呼吁政府更改关于色情和性行为的相关法律，和世界同步。我们这次能联系采访到李银河真的很幸运。几年前，力尽神倦的李银河曾宣称不愿再讨论自己的工作和研究。虽然当时政府高层已经不认为她的作品有政治敏感性，但李还是被要求符合道德标尺，社会礼仪。那时她说不再发表和性研究相关的文章，也不接受媒体采访了。

采访中，李银河的回答是简洁而精准的，但我们一直没能很好的交流传达。自然，她的回答要么有所保留，要么对我们的无知问题有所不耐。采访结束，我们发现得的的信息和我们已知的信息没什么大的出入，尽管李向我们介绍了她目前在研究的项目。

目前，李在做家庭关系发展的相关课题。她选取了中国东南西北中五个城市，从哈尔滨到广州，研究这些城市里家庭关系的发展变化。李原先料想的是中国的家庭关系已经日趋西化，亲子间的传统的责任纽带正被消弱，核心家庭渐成主流。然后事实上，中国的家庭里，父母和儿女间的纽带还是牢不可破，家庭成员在一起的时间很是很多。

诧异的是，李同时发现家庭关系的地域性并不明显，南北差异不大。大部分的中国家庭，要么是夫权，要么是夫妇分权，只有在哈尔滨，东北地区，要么是丈夫主导，要么是妻子掌权，没有中间分权地带的。“（东北人）他们性格比较强。”李笑称。

ANY_CHARACTER_HERE