In China, Delicately Testing the Taboo on Talking About Sex

"If you want to date in middle school, you have to act like a guerrilla," said Su Ran, a 17-year-old student who said she kissed her first boyfriend at 13. "You talk secretly, you kiss in a small alley. The teacher is always like a ghost, she will appear at any time."

Liu Xiaoqing, a recent graduate of an elite Beijing high school, said her girlfriends were too embarrassed to ask questions about sex. She rates her own sex ed -- the screening of one film that explained how the egg meets the sperm and another that showed animals having sex -- as woefully inadequate.

But attitudes are changing.

"Twenty years ago, if you looked at a guy or a girl for more than 20 seconds, you would be judged as sick," said Liu, 18. "Now, more and more kids hold hands and kiss in public."

In some schools, sex education is taught several times a year.

"Different districts have different textbooks. Sex education is a comparatively sensitive topic, and it's still in a pilot phase," said Xu Zhenlei, vice secretary of the China Sexology Association, a group of academics that advises government officials. "Generally speaking, most parents are against sex education. If you're talking about the sex education that says, 'Don't date and focus on your studies,' of course they support that."

When Wu, the radio co-host, first volunteered to lecture in schools in 1992, she was often rejected immediately. She now speaks at about 50 schools a year. "The people in the Education Ministry are already more open than they were 10 years ago," she said. "But they still can't keep up with what students need."

It's no better at home, where parents who have had no sex education themselves don't understand why it's necessary.

Zhang's second book, "Roses Hidden in a Book Bag," published in 2004, is full of stories of high school students having unprotected sex and parents unable or unwilling to discuss the issue. Zhang is now working on a third book, about sex and middle school students. The students featured in her first book were born in the early 1980s, and they prized their virginity and worried that too much sex was harmful.

One boy told Zhang he was in elementary school when his mother slapped him after he accompanied her to a museum exhibit and asked what a penis was. Back home, his mother demanded, "How can you get married if you act like a hooligan at so young an age?"

"The most important thing is Chinese traditional ideas about sex," Wu said. "You cannot tell exactly what sex is. And that is exactly what the students want to know. China used to hide this subject under the table. They considered it dirty, and changing attitudes takes a long time."

In the absence of frank discussion, teenagers turn to the Internet or easy-to-find adult videos. Most of the 600,000 registered users of the sites in a large online pornography case were juveniles, prosecutors in Shaanxi province said. Eight out of nine suspects charged were about 20 years old.