Abstract

This chapter addresses the question of sex and modernity in China, from around the early to mid-twentieth century. It begins with a discussion on the Chinese character xing, the modern, scientific and value-neutral term for sex, which emerged in China in the 1910s and 1920s, and was most likely to have originated from Japanese intellectuals’ encounter with Western medicine and sexology. Debates on the nature of xing were an important part of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, which also involved the translation and appropriation of a tremendous range of Western ideas. To illustrate the cultural and political dynamics, the case of the notorious Chinese intellectual Zhang Jingsheng (1888-1970) is examined, paying particular attention to his theory of the “Third Kind of Water” (disanzhong shui) which combines eugenics with the pursuit of sexual pleasure. The similarities between Zhang’s theory and “inner alchemy”—specifically the practice of “coitus reservatus”—lead to an analysis of the fate of Daoist practices in modern China from Ye Dehui’s (1864-1927) reconstruction of sexual cultivation texts in the late-Qing Dynasty, to the advocacy of “cutting off desire” (duanyu) by modernising Daoist adepts in the Republican period. The chapter ends with a brief note on Western intellectuals, like Joseph Needham (1900-1995), who saw something deeply appealing in ancient Chinese sexuality and thought it could be repackaged as an antidote to modernity itself.