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    A Gay History of China
    A Gay History of China
    A Gay History of China
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    A Gay History of China

    By Paul Knobel

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    About this ebook

    This is the chapter on China from the author's A Gay History of the World/Human Male Homosexuality; A World History. A Gay History of the World has a chapter for each of the world's 193 countries and there are thus 193 chapters. The whole work can also be purchased on Smashwords.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPaul Knobel
    Release dateAug 13, 2015
    ISBN9781311194190
    A Gay History of China
    Author

    Paul Knobel

    Paul Knobel is a poet and gay researcher who was born in Australia. He is the author of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry (2002) which covered the world and came to 1 million words. He is also the author of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Art (2005) and other works including GAYFBA: gay fashion bibliography annotated (2019) and a short biography of Martin Smith, Australia's first gay historian. Both works were published in databases and the poetry encyclopedia is now on the internet. He is also the author of 7 volumes of poems .

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      Book preview

      A Gay History of China - Paul Knobel

      Paul Knobel

      A gay history of China

      Sydney: Burke and Wills

      Copyright Paul Knobel 2020. The work below forms part of a larger work, A gay history of the world.

      China

      Male homosexual acts are legal in China. Like India, the country has a huge and ancient culture of homosexuality and has been notably tolerant over its long 5,000 year written history. When laws did exist (eg for prostitution) penalties were light in comparison with Europe (eg a maximum of 100 strokes of the cane for prostitution). Unlike in Europe, no gays were burnt at the stake in China.

      Under the Communists from 1949 to the 1990s homosexuals did suffer persecution (but so did nearly everyone in China) and only in 1997 did the government abolish the hooligan law which had been the main law used to prosecute gays since the Communist takeover. In 2001 homosexuality was removed from the list of mental illnesses. Today in China the legal age of consent for sexual activity is 14, regardless of gender and/or sexual orientation. In Hong Kong it is 16 and in Macau 18 (Macau is a former Portuguese colony which has been part of China from 1999). Hong Kong has antidiscrimination provisions covering homosexuality in its legal system but they only apply to government entities; under the agreement signed by Britain with China when its former colony Hong Kong was handed back in 1997 human rights in Hong Kong are covered by the United Nations International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. Censorship, especially of the internet, exists in China; however the internet has also been an increasing force for exposing corruption and for openness.

      Facts

      The People’s Republic of China, as China’s official name is, at 9,706,000 square kilometers (3,747,000 square miles is the third largest country in the world after Russia and Canada. To the north of China are Russia and Mongolia, to the northeast North Korea; to the south China has borders with Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, India, Bhutan, and Nepal while to the west lie the Islamic states of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The east coast is on the Yellow Sea, East China Sea and South China Sea. Across the Taiwan Strait opposite the southern province of Fujian lies the island Taiwan (claimed by Chnia) and to the northeast the peninsula of North and South Korea, while across the East China sea is Japan. To the southeast across the South China Sea lies the Philippines.

      With an estimated population of 1,344,000,000 million people in 2011, China has the largest population of any country in the world. The country is a republic whose capital is Beijing. Though officially other political parties are legal, in practice there is only one political party, the Communist Party. The National People’s Congress, the country’s parliament, meets yearly but in practice power lies in the hand of the 178 member Presidium of the Congress which consists of the Communist elite.

      The official language of China is Mandarin, a tonal language which is part of the Sino-Tibetan family. Mandarin is based on the Chinese language of Beijing and is known in China as Putonghua (common speech); it has 4 tones the use of which can alter the meaning of a word. There are several other varieties of Chinese: they include Shanghaiese (spoken in the port city of Shanghai) with 5 tones and Cantonese (spoken in the southern coastal part of China) with 6 tones. The complicated 5,000 year old Chinese writing system is not alphabetic and is difficult to master. Altogether some 292 living languages are spoken in China from 8 language families. Amongst minority languages, Mongolian, Uyghur and Zhuang all have major status with speakers of over 2 million each. In the province of Tibet, invaded and conquered by China in 1950, Tibetan, also in the Sino-Tibetan family, is the spoken language and has an ancient literary culture of 1,500 years.

      Ethnicly Han Chinese are the major group in China but there are 56 recognized ethnic groups including, beside the Han, 55 recognized minority peoples. The largest group at 91.6% are Han. They are followed by the Zhuang (16.9 million), Hui (10.5 million), Manchu (10.3 million), Uyghur (10 million), Miao (9.4 million), Yi (8.7 million), Tujia (8.3 million), Tibetans (6.2 million), Mongols (5.9 million), Dong (2.8 million), Hani (1.6 million), Li (1.4 million), Kazakhs (1.4 million) and Dai (1.2 million). China has many religions though all are supervised by the Communist Party: they include Christianity (where there is a special supervised state branch of the Catholic Church), Islam (in the western provinces), Buddhism, Daoism and Animism. Both Christianity and Buddhism are growing after being repressed under Communism. Confucianism is an ancient traditional belief discussed below which has also recently revived. The Fulan Gong cult is regarded with great suspicion and as a platform for opposition; many overseas Chinese support it and it publishes the Epoch Times newspaper.

      There is a huge Chinese overseas diaspora in countries from Thailand and Malaysia to New Zealand, Great Britain and the United States (where there are over 3 million Chinese). In Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia this diaspora dates back many centuries and is dominant in business. China has had a fast growing economy in recent years and estimated per person nominal GDP was $US 6,853 in 2013. There are huge discrepancies in wages between the cities on the coast and those inland. There is also an increasing gap between the very rich and the poor.

      History

      Archeological evidence suggests hominoids lived in China up to 2.24 million years ago. Fossils of Peking Man, a species of homo erectus found in the Zhoukoudian cave date back 780,000 years and caused a sensation when discovered in 1923–27. Evidence of homo sapiens (modern humanity) dates from 18,000 years ago and Chinese writing from about 3000 BC; though cumbersome, it has allowed for the recording of Chinese history for nearly 5,000 years. The earliest Chinese words were engraved on oracle bones (tortoise shell or bone) and relate to religious rituals.

      CHINESE WRITING Chinese is written in characters which do not correspond to sounds. The characters are constructed using 10 basic strokes. With 1000 characters newspapers can be read but knowledge of 3 thousand characters is needed for competence. The advantage of the system is that the characters can be read all over the country (though pronounced differently in different areas since different languages are used for speaking). Only a small minority of people before the mid twentieth century could read and write written Chinese, so scholars had great prestige. Many became administrators. Chinese characters were also written and read by scholars in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, thus making China’s huge literary heritage known to the countries around it. Chinese is now also transliterated into the Roman alphabet (but there are two different systems, Wade Giles and Hanyu Pinyin). Because of the complexity of the writing system characters were carved onto wood and pages

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