Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 15 July 1996
Velisarios Kattoulas

The pair, in their 30s, hovered over the "Dream," a yellow, plastic banana on sale for $55, including batteries, but left empty-handed from Beijing's first licensed sex shop -- the Bang Bang Peace and Happiness Health Center.

The government has announced it will require all of China's 517 sex shops to obtain business licenses as part of a drive to clamp down on pornography, which has blossomed during nearly two decades of economic reform.

China's new licensing regulations are also part of a move to educate Chinese about sex, a taboo topic during years of Maoist puritanism, amid fears of an explosion of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) in the world's most populous country.

With the tighter regulations, the China Sexology Association aims to stop China's sex shops from selling pornographic goods and "to advocate advanced sex ideology and behaviors," the official Xinhua news agency said.

"Some people come here with physiological defects to see whether they can solve them," a Bang Bang shop assistant said as Chinese pop music blared from a stereo and three middle-aged men carefully inspected the shop's merchandise.

"If we can't help them, we tell them not to be embarrassed because of Chinese cultural attitudes and send them to a hospital," the woman said.

After the Communist takeover in 1949, permissive sexual attitudes were frowned on and often punished. But following Mao's death in 1976 and the liberalization of China's economy since 1979, some of the prudishness has disappeared.

Prostitutes, cleared off the streets under Mao, now roam the lobbies of many hotels, brothels have reappeared, many disguised as barber shops, and pirated pornographic laser discs can be bought from street-corner hawkers.

China's leaders see the looser sexual mores as a sign of Western capitalist decadence and periodically clamp down on prostitution and pornography.

Chinese medical experts fear the less puritan sexual attitudes could trigger an AIDS explosion.

"AIDS has actually threatened everyone and the whole nation must pay careful attention to it," Xinhua news agency quoted Chen Chunming of the National Specialists' Committee for Preventing and Controlling AIDS as telling a June conference.

In 1995, the number of people diagnosed with the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS rose by nearly half to 3,341, state media said.

However, AIDS experts have said the real number of Chinese infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) could be as high as 100,000 because of insufficient reporting and misdiagnoses.

AIDS in China, the world's most populous country with 1.2 billion people, has hit homosexuals, bisexuals and intravenous drug users hard, but is spreading rapidly among heterosexuals as well.

Housed in a rickety, two-story building, Bang Bang opened two years ago and won government approval on June 14, when the China Sexology Society issued China's first official licenses to 20 sex shops nationwide.

Most of Bang Bang's 500 to 600 visitors each day are men in their 50s who buy creams and lotions to improve sexual performance, the shop assistant said.

As well as scores of varieties of condoms -- ranging from plain to flavored to studded -- the store stocks Chinese herbal sexual performance remedies and sex toys that would probably have landed the owners in jail under Mao's austere reign.

A battery-powered vacuum erection tube sells for $39. A "Forbidden Fruit" gift box filled with condoms, lubricants and "annular emulsion bags" sells for $31, and a penis enlarger "for men and women" sells for $25.
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