However, another book entitled The Third Water, in which Zhang discussed female orgasm, female ejaculation and the importance of sexual satisfaction to women’s emotional health soon landed the author in hot water.
With British sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis’s works dominating sexual discourse among the cognoscenti, Zhang saw a window in the market and published his works in short, digestible volumes with provocative covers often featuring naked women, making his books instant bestsellers. Zhang also exclusively employed young and pretty female clerks, against the established practice of Chinese stores at the time rarely employing women.
Such business practices gave further ammunition to Zhang’s critics, who labeled the Beauty Bookstore an “obscene place” for “good-for-nothing” people to buy The Third Water from “seductive temptresses.” Even fellow sexologists such as Zhou Jianren and Pan Guangdan condemned The Third Water as “unscientific” and “licentious.”
Despite its popularity, the Beauty Bookstore operated at a loss and failed to gain pa-tronage from a liberal establishment increasingly disturbed by Zhang’s opposition to the mainstream. The store closed after less than two years, adding to the pressure on Zhang to give up his crusade.
According to Another Aspect of Literary Men by Wen Xinchuan, a Chinese writer who was one of Zhang Jingsheng’s contemporaries, Zhang became involved in no less than 10 lawsuits connected to the bookstore. When Zhang took a vacation to Hangzhou, Zhejiang in 1928 after his business was shut down, he was arrested by local police on charges of “sexual instigation” and later deported from the province.
Too Progressive
“Love is conditional, changeable and comparable, and matrimony a kind of friendship.” Zhang announced his concept of love in the periodical Supplement to a Morning Newspaper in 1923 when the public unanimously criticized Professor Tan Xihong of Peking University for marrying Chen Shujun, his deceased wife’s sister. Zhang came to his defense, vigorously extolling the “freedom of love.” His unconventional ideas triggered a massive public debate on romantic love, the first of its kind in China, where arranged marriages remained the norm.
Zhang opposed breast-binding and promoted coed schools and even skinny dipping. He encouraged birth control as a solution to the population explosion as early as the 1920s. He presented a proposal to warlord Chen Jiongming, then military governor of Guangdong, to implement a comprehensive family planning policy, only to find himself suspected of being psychotic.
“I’m afraid that Zhang Jingsheng’s vision won’t come to pass until the 25th century,” Lu Xun, China’s most prominent writer at the time, remarked in an essay.
Zhang’s ideas were revolutionary by any contemporary standard. According to his biographer Zhang Peizhong, Zhang was the first Chinese to translate Henri Rousseau’s Confession and the first to introduce the Western science of logic to Chinese universities. He helped spread agricultural knowledge in his hometown and appealed for peace between the warring Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War.
Yet, such efforts and deeds were overshadowed by his controversial promotion of sexual freedom. While his contemporaries like Li Dazhao and Lu Xun gained accolades for disseminating Marxism or promoting “new culture,” Zhang was labeled a “philanderer.”
“My father was born out of his time,” Zhang Chao, Zhang Jingsheng’s second son, told media in 2005. “In a society just emerging from feudalism, his ideas were offensive to many people.”
Zhang’s reputation for unorthodoxy pursued him for the rest of his life. Despite being in his late seventies, he was banished to the countryside and shut up in a dilapidated, windowless hovel until his death in 1970.
Although Zhang was posthumously rehabilitated in the 1980s, he remains recognized primarily for his contributions to philosophy rather than sexology. Sex remains a sensitive topic in Chinese society, and the open discussion of sexuality in all but the most clinical terms can cause writers and academics to fall foul of strict anti-pornography laws. Zhang’s biographies and selected works are easily found in mainland bookstores, but his masterworks The History of Sex or The Third Water remain unseen.
Despite calls for more comprehensive sex education in schools from some quarters, some high schools are already following the lead of American schools with “abstinence-based education,” an approach which has met with little success in reducing teen pregnancy and underage sexual activity in the US. However, a comprehensive, national sex education curriculum is seen by liberal academics both in China and abroad as crucial to the success of any attempt to relax the one child policy. Zhang Jingsheng’s era may have passed, but the need for open dialogue about human sexuality in China has never been greater.
November 2010
