Confucian sages readily admitted that hunger for food and sex is a part of human nature. Nevertheless, in China, as elsewhere in the world, one can talk about food virtually without reservation, but discussing sex can make people uncomfortable, to say the least. This fact also holds true in academia, where incomparably more research on the history of Chinese food and China's culinary traditions has been published compared with that on sex and sexuality. Therefore, Y. Yvon Wang's Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China is a welcome addition to the relatively thin literature on the subject.

Wang's agenda is ambitious. The book investigates how pornography and sexual representations in general were perceived, used, and policed in China for about four centuries, from late imperial times to the contemporary era. Using archival materials and government documents (especially, Beijing police files) as well as novels, periodicals, newspapers, memories, nude images, and so on, Wang pieces together what might be called a social landscape of illicit sex in China during the period under consideration. The concept of socially illegitimate sex, or yin (licentiousness), has persisted, often in a reinvented form, from imperial times to the modern era. Wang focuses on the eventful decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and most of the empirical materials used in the book are from the revolutionary and transitional period. Wang indicates that the birth of the twentieth century did not erase earlier understandings of licentiousness. Instead, “the illicit allure of many older genres and content was powerful enough that it merged with new genres” (p. 132). Likewise, the belief among the authorities and, to a great extent, the general public in imperial times that pornography and other representations of sexuality were offensive and unacceptable continued into the Mao years, an era when sexual repression was, as Wang puts it, “most damaging” (p. 205).

Following Thomas Laqueur's identification of pornography as the “literary twin” of masturbation, Wang calls the construct of the imagined consumer the “implied masturbator” (p. 19). Wang indicates that a yin ideology was built on hierarchies of desire associated with the socioeconomic status of the implied masturbators. Up to the mid-nineteenth century, access to sexual representations was a privilege enjoyed by the financially well-off. New media technological developments that enabled mass production, such as woodblock printing and photography, gradually changed this situation. People of modest means then could afford to patronize the vendors in places such as Beijing's Liulichang and Tianqiao, where cheap books were available. Here, Wang reemphasizes the persistence of yin ideology, indicating that although sexual representations had become widely available, a “global modern pornographic paradigm that evolved between the 1880s and the 1930s and persists to our day has not been solely characterized by new technology, new ideologies, and new scales of commodification and circulation” (p. 122).

However, the emphasis on the persistence of Chinese pornographic culture does not prevent Wang from looking at the other side of the coin: the changes that Chinese pornographic culture underwent as part of the transition to modernity. Wang challenges Michel Foucault's exclusion of China from his vision of modern sexuality, pointing out that “we cannot afford to ignore the term ‘modernity,’ in spite of its flaws” and that there were lively interactions and exchanges between “Chinese depictions of and discourse about sex” and “nascent Euro-American formulations of ‘sexual nature’” (pp. 13–15). For instance, while the roadside peepshows that arose in the early nineteenth century were credited to the West, traditional Chinese eroticism “would play an important role in the European-led conceptualization of modern sexuality as a universal element of human experience” (pp. 41–42, 97). Policing social vices or perceived social vices such as nudity, sexual representatives, and contraception were seen as part of the function of a universal modern state, and legal codes associated with this function were often taken from the “Westernized” Meiji Japan (pp. 4, 67, 128). In short, despite its specificity, China is still very much part of the Foucauldian version of modern sexuality and “global modernity,” and not a passive receiver of “a one-way transmission from vanguard West to stagnant East” (p. 14).

Wang claims that “the apparent ubiquitous manifestations of power and hierarchy in injunctions against sexual representations across centuries and national boundaries impelled me to reach beyond Chinese history in this book” (p. 11). It is a bit disappointing that Wang does not actually deliver on this promise. Readers may well wish to see more comparisons of the global integration of the concepts and practices associated with sexuality and the yin ideology. For instance, “spring pictures” or shunga, erotic pictures of the “floating world” (ukiyo-e), were vigorously suppressed in Japan from the 1870s onward as part of Meiji Japan's “cultural modernization” based on Western moral values, while in China the evolution of visual sexual representations from old spring pictures to new pornographic photographs seemed to be uninterrupted. Likewise, since Wang's book touches on contemporary China, a more substantial discussion of how sex is perceived, judged, accepted, and indeed enjoyed in multiple ways than ever before in modern China might be warranted. Here, the adult toy stores (in the name of “adult health care”) that mushroomed in Chinese cities in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, for instance, might well be a subject around which one could build a comparative discussion by engaging with Hallie Lieberman's microhistory of sex culture primarily in the West, Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.Footnote ¹

Since the publication of Matthew H. Sommer's pioneering Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China,Footnote ² which introduced sex and the state's criminalization of sexual behavior as subjects for academic study, there has been a growing interest in the topic of sex and sexuality in China.Footnote ³ Wang's book, rich in detail and perceptive in analysis, has added an important new dimension to the literature on sexuality.