by Allison Chen
XUPU, China—Pinzheng Tang’s teacher distributed “sex-ed” manuals—wedged between their math, history, and language textbooks—to him and his classmates on their first day of high school. On that sultry summer Hunan day, Tang regarded the manuals with mild curiosity, but they were never mentioned again.
“Rural schools won’t have sex education classes,” Tang, a 15-year-old student at rural Hunan’s Xupu No. 1 Middle School, said in an interview with The Politic. “Unlike city schools, we need to spend all of class preparing for the gaokao [China’s national college entrance exam].” To learn everything they must know, Tang and his classmates go to school from Monday to Saturday, with class from 7:50am to around 9pm each day. “We simply don’t have time for sex ed.”
He and his friends have never read the manual during the little free time they have, Tang said.
In December, China finished its first year of issuing certifications to sex educators. Until recently, the vast majority of Chinese adolescents had no formal sex education. In 2011, China’s State Council made sexual health education mandatory in all schools, but most teachers taught abstinence-based education or biology-textbook sexual reproduction. In 2018, the Chinese government issued certifications to sex-ed lecturers, and these lecturers have created pop-up sex-ed camps, which some have attended in response to schools’ lack of comprehensive sex-ed.
“It’s still very conservative here,” Yang Chen, a homeroom teacher at the rural Xupu No. 1 Middle School, said. “Sex education has not yet entered our classrooms with great fanfare.” Chen explains that if there were any sex education for students in rural Hunan, it would appear in a junior high biology class, if at all. As part of a series titled Life and Health Common Knowledge (生命与健康常识 ), Hunan students may receive “textbooks” that discuss a variety of health, safety, and hygiene tips. The content ranges from a biological explanation and diagram of male and female reproductive organs to advice for rescuing a drowning person. While some rural junior high schools dedicate class time to accompanying the “textbook,” sex is mentioned briefly—one unit in a littany of many. Read more via the Politic