The profound economic changes that China has undergone in the last quarter of a century have resulted not only in dramatic skyscrapers in all its major cities and a marked rise in the standard of living, but also in changing social mores, with attitudes today contrasting sharply with those of the strait-laced Chinese society of the past.
Still, it came as a shock to read of wife-swapping clubs in cities, where well-educated men and women, all consenting adults with responsible jobs, agreed to swap spouses to 'spice up' boring marital lives. Even more surprising is that commentators do not uniformly condemn such practices.
To be sure, those in official positions do not openly condone such practices. For example, Li Mingshun, secretary-general of the China Marriage and Family Law Association, said that wife-swapping is an illegal act and violates the principle of a monogamous relationship. Even if all parties involved are consenting adults, he said, such an act is still a violation.
However, Zhu Jianjun, a psychology professor in Beijing, said that 'swinging' is natural in a society where people have been sexually repressed for a long time. Any relaxation in social mores, he said, would result in a small number of people going to the opposite extreme. As to whether the government should prosecute such people, he said that as long as nobody got hurt, 'we should ignore it'. Ultimately, he said, the pendulum will spring back to normal.
'You may have a moral stand against it,' the China Daily quoted one person as saying. 'But there is no money exchanged. It is just an experiment of another lifestyle. It's part of one's privacy.'
However, in less-sophisticated parts of the country, there have been instances of men forcing their wives to 'swap' spouses as an alternative to going to prostitutes. In remote Guizhou province, for example, after two men agreed to swap wives without the women's consent, one reported her husband to the authorities and both men were jailed for rape.
Not surprisingly, young people nowadays engage in sexual experimentation to a greater extent than people of their parents' generation. One hospital in Chongqing, in southwestern China, reported that teenage girls made up more than one-third of its abortion cases.
