Capitalism and Gay Life in China

An essay in today’s China Daily, “Gays live a difficult life under social bias,” tells how, although life for gay people in China is quite difficult, things are getting better. It’s a very sympathetic look at the struggle that gay people face in a traditional society. It’s discreetly not mentioned, but the situation is infinitely preferable to the public executions to which gay people were sentenced in the old days. What’s missing from an otherwise interesting story is any explanation of why things have been changing in China. My friend Zhou Xiao (those of us who have difficulty pronouncing Chinese names call her “Kate”) told me in Shanghai in 1997 that she was convinced that “China will never go communist again.” I asked her why she was so sure and she announced that she (and her very patient husband) had already been in Shanghai for a week doing field research on on changing public attitudes in China and they had found that “Shanghai is just full of gay bars. And when the gay bars come in, they’re never going back to socialism!” In her discussions with customers, she said that she asked what had accounted for the change (that was before the laws were amended to eliminate criminal penalites for sexual contact among members of the same gender) and she said that the response was that the big step had been privatization of housing. Under socialism, housing was rationed and allocated by the state. Married couples were eligible to be allocated flats; unmarried people were not. So gay people (who had not been forced into phony marriages) had to live with their parents or in worker dormitories and couldn’t create households together. When housing was privatized, however, “landlords didn’t care if you were purple and had horns, if you were willing to pay.” A little bit of the profit motive swept away a great deal of irrationality, cruelty, and oppression.

Hat tip to Jude Blanchette.

UPDATE: The New York Times (req. simple registration) has a piece today on “A Chinese University Removes a Topic From the Closet.” (And no, I’m not generally a fan of “gay studies”– or black studies, or women’s studies — programs in universities, but I’m not opposed to courses in sociology, history, law, and the like that convey useful information at a properly academic level and in a suitably disinterested manner. All of those topics do deserve academic study, just not in specialized and ghettoized departments in which the faculty members spend most of their time slapping each other on the backs about how wonderfully liberating their “scholarship” is.)