Focus on the Family Brings Abstinence Agenda to China

In 2006, officials in Yunnan Province, China, stumbled across Focus On The Family patriarch James Dobson's radio commentaries, and liked what they heard about parenting, gender issues, family values, and, most significantly, pre-marital sex. On a 2007 trip to the United States, they made a point of stopping by Colorado Springs to compliment Dobson and give their respects.

The meeting, an indicator of the increasing surreality of international politics and the bizarre overlap between the extreme right-wing and the Communism-as-dictatorship "left wing," led to the exportation of Focus on the Family's abstinence-only programs to China. It took two years to translate the program and two years to push it through all the appropriate bureaucratic channels (the Communist Party insisted on no religious or political references, which, as Slate writer Tracy Clark-Flory remarked, is deeply ironic seeing as the organization is essentially an emphatically Christian lobbyist for the far right-wing).

And in the previous week, abstinence-only programs kicked off in China, with their condoms-don't-work scare tactics and their antiquated clunkers like, "If you want to celebrate our love, bring me roses at 7 p.m. and let's go to dinner." The latter actually sounds a lot like some of the more guileless, rosy-cheeked propaganda from the height of Chinese Communist rule, when couples were forced to pledge their love wholly to the state, and even small gestures of affection could be seen as indications of insurrection (see Jung Chang's Wild Swans for more on this).

It seems more of an indicator than ever of the panicked retrograde motion of China's leaders that they're forced to turn to an American evangelical organization to sustain the last vestiges of restrictive, state-controlled Communist "morality." There is an overpowering and inevitable sense of change in China, and for as much as the Chinese government would like to believe that this change is purely physical and economic, it is also affecting social, political and personal values. One example: more and more Chinese teenagers are having premarital sex. More are questioning traditional Chinese values (some of which were challenged under Communism, others of which were simply given different names).

And what is the response of the government? To turn to new, but very familiar tactics: values campaigns that reinforce traditional gender roles and female submissiveness, and blind denial of any indicators that such submissiveness and roles might be changing.

Photo credit: Mugs99