Li Yinhe, ​“Compared to Money and Power, Love Can Give People the Greatest Happiness” 

Li Yinhe, “Compared to Money and Power, Love Can Give People the Greatest Happiness”[1]
 
Introduction by David Ownby, Translation by Selena Orly
 
Introduction
 
Li Yinhe (b. 1952) is a scholar, writer, and activist, best known for her sociological exploration of sex and homosexuality in China.  She grew up in Beijing in an intellectual family; both parents worked at the People’s Daily when she was young, and although her father got in a bit of trouble during the anti-rightist campaign that followed the Hundred Flowers, her parents mainly kept their careers and connections intact over the course of their lives.  This was important to Li, because she was born at exactly the right moment for her life to be completely upended by the Cultural Revolution, but due to her parents’ connections, it was not.  She got out of Inner Mongolia, where she had been sent for purposes of “rustification” after only three years, and was able to get into university in 1974 during worker-peasant-soldier period.   
 
Although she studied history at university, Li preferred working with living people, and switched to sociology.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she worked at the Marxism Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and, by coincidence, wound up helping Fei Xiaotong revive sociology after its long hibernation (the CCP under Mao considered sociology to be a bourgeois science, made redundant by Marxism).  At the age of 30, Li began studying for a doctorate in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh (where she was joined by her husband, the writer Wang Xiaobo).  Returning to China later in the decade, she eventually got a position at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where she remained until her retirement a few years ago. 
 
She chose sex as her research project, and launched a series of surveys and interviews that began with the sex lives of “ordinary people” and eventually grew to focus on LGBTQ life in China and even sado-masochism.  Throughout, her attitude has been that sex is a normal part of life, in China and elsewhere, and she was merely trying to describe it and chart whatever changes were occurring.  She further believes that everyone has the right to the sex life they want, as long as they do no harm to others.  Thus homosexuality is fine, orgies are fine, pornography is fine…I have not read this work, and thus do not know if it was brilliant and innovative as well as pioneering, but she remains, even after her retirement, one of a very few scholars to pay attention to sex and sexual subcultures.
 
Her publications met with some resistance, and she occasionally had to publish in Hong Kong or shelve a project and return to it later, but most of her work eventually came out and was generally welcomed by the Chinese people, who were living something of a sexual revolution after the enforced Puritanism of the Mao era.  The trials of getting her work published, as well as the sympathy she felt for the LGBTQ community and others who often suffered discrimination in China eventually made her into an activist as well, although she is naturally reserved and soft-spoken. 
 
The text translated here is an interview connected to a book tour; Li had just published Li Yinhe Talks about Love 李银河说爱情 and was making the rounds.  The interview is probing and Li covers the high points of her career and her most recent work, but it is still a bit People magazine.  If you want to know more about Li, I recommend the excellent and though interview in English here.  There is also her autobiography--I’ve Lived, I’ve Loved, I’ve Written 活过，爱过，写过—which at the moment is only available in Chinese, although I might translate it some day.
 
Translation
 
The more feelings matter, the more marriage is subject to change
 
Interface: In your last book, We are All Dust in the Universe, you talked at length about love, and your new book, Li Yinhe Talks about Love, is also about love. Some people, such as Simone de Beauvoir, argue that if love becomes the purpose of a woman’s life, it may keep her from becoming happy. In your opinion, is love being over-emphasized today, is passionate love being placed on too high a pedestal?

Li Yinhe: In fact, in the Western cultural tradition, women were considered to be dominated by emotions, and their whole lives were spent in the private sphere, because the public sphere belonged to men. So there was this saying: Men conquer the world, and women conquer the world by conquering a man. A woman's “purpose” is to love; men are moderate, but women are forever fixated on this one thing, which is love. When you say that love may make women unhappy, you have to bear in mind that except for this one thing—love—women were seen to do nothing, have nothing, and have no “thing” of their own. The real change in the fortune of women came through participation in the productive work of society, when they become a member of the public sphere, and take their places as genuine equals to men. De Beauvoir's concern was precisely directed at the traditional society in the past and its male domination.
 
If we reconsider love in the context of modern society that is moving towards equality between men and women, the meaning of love is different from what it once was, and it is different from the love that de Beauvoir criticized. Love is an equal relationship between a woman and a man. If we divide life into material parts and emotional parts, then love is simply your emotional life.
 
The proportion of female university students in China has now reached 50%, compared with 30% in the 1980s, and the proportion of women entering the labor market is now 46%. From a global perspective, this percentage is considered relatively high, higher than in some Western countries. In Western countries there are more women who don’t work, and who spend their entire lives in the private sphere. Today in China we have a many women who work, indeed it is practically the norm for both husband and wife to work.  There are three markers of social class among humans—money, prestige, and political power.  I think that the lives of most people consist of pursuing these three things, climbing these three ladders, working as hard as they can to achieve them and thus obtain their ultimate goals. In the current situation, I think love can bring more happiness to people than these other three things.
 
Interface: So do you think the importance of love in modern society is overrated, or underrated?
 
Li Yinhe: Underrated.
 
Interface: There is now a philosophical and sociological position that suggests that because there are so many possibilities and people have endless choices, the possibility of multiple relationships has emerged, and divorce has become all the more casual, so in a way true love has died. Do you agree with this statement?
 
Li Yinhe: This is like saying that there is no true love left in the world, and I disagree. I have carried out social surveys, both quantitative and qualitative. In the qualitative studies, many, many people talked to me about their relationship experiences, and it is clear that true love has absolutely not died, and some people are even ready to die for love. I also met a lot of homosexuals while doing my survey work. People tend to think that that homosexuals don't fall in love at all, and just care about sex, but this is not true. They also have a lot of love stories, the kind of love that completely takes over your life and sends you to hell and back.  When I did a qualitative survey on marriage in Beijing, using random sampling, I asked a few questions like: Does your spouse love you? Do you love him/her? How is your relationship? 50% answered: He/she loves me very much, I love him/her very much, and our relationship is very good.
 
Interface: So you think that the current high divorce rate and low marriage rate does not mean the end of love?
 
Li Yinhe: Some people divorce because love has gone away, not because they were never in love. Love is more volatile than other things. Why was the divorce rate so low in traditional marriages in the past? Because emotional factors didn’t matter all that much. Many marriages are partnerships, and such marriages can be very long-lasting. But the greater the emotional component of a marriage, the more likely it is to change.
 
Interface: What is the most wonderful thing you have yourself ever experienced in love?
 
Li Yinhe: To be loved by someone or to fall in love with someone—when love happens, it feels wonderful. I think one of the things that is particularly attractive about love is its uncertainty. Because the other person is a living, breathing human being with all kinds of ideas, and you have your own expectations as well. Love is different from other things in life that are always the same and can be trivial or boring, and there will be something that will surprise and delight you about love.
 
Equal rights for the LGBTQ community is a tug-of-war
 
Interface: We noticed that you often answer netizens’ questions on Weibo. As you see it, how much has the public perception of love and sex progressed compared to what it was a few decades ago?
 
Li Yinhe: People’s thinking has changed a fair bit. For example, in the past people could not tolerate premarital sex, because China was a society that placed great value on virginity. I remember one year a female representative of the National People’s Congress even said that the best gift a girl can give her husband's family is her virginity. So people still thought that way not so long ago. But most people don’t think that way now, because everyone has already voted with their behavior. Of course, people still seem to disapprove of the idea, but the proportion of people who engage in premarital sex has reached 71%, which means that seven out of ten of people have had sex before marriage. Isn’t this a big change? In fact, changes in marriage and family in some Western countries, including the incidence of premarital sex, occur very slowly, usually only a percentage point or two every year.  But not in China.  China is completely different.  When I did a survey in 1989, the incidence of premarital sex was only 15 per cent, and in 2013, it was 71 per cent, which is a huge change.
 
Interface: Comparatively speaking then, where do you see a lack of progress in the public perception of love and sex?
 
Li Yinhe: There is still quite a bit of discrimination against homosexuals, which can be quite severe. This includes some doctors who discriminate because they were educated to regard homosexuality as a mental illness. It was not until 2001 that homosexuality was removed from the official psychiatric classification criteria, so many doctors still consider homosexuality to be a mental illness. In fact, they can't get over it and change their thinking, because homosexuality is very complicated, and what causes homosexuality is also very complex, and if you don’t understand the cause, how do you correct how you think about it?
 
Interface: Since you brought up homosexuality, you said last year that there has been a constant tug of war in China over equal rights for LGBTQ people. But it seems that the LGBTQ community is still facing relatively strong public pressure.
 
Li Yinhe: It’s always two steps forward and one step back. In fact, the earliest official positive coverage of the LGBTQ community was during the Shanghai Gay Pride Day in 2011, which has now become Pride Week. It does seem to me that it’s been a mixed bag on the issue of LGBTQ rights over the past decade. For example, not long ago, China's representative at the UN made three statements at the Human Rights Council—first that China is determined to protect the health of the LGBTQ community, second that sex reassignment surgery is legal in China, and third that China has not yet approved same-sex marriage, not because we discriminate against homosexuals, but because of historical and cultural factors. I think we can take this attitude as quite progressive, and different from what we sometimes see in China. Sometimes censorship standards for movies or televisions actually equate homosexuality with obscenity, which is very bad, and the logic does not make sense.
 
Interface: Just recently, same-sex couples in Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing had their guardianship agreements[2] 意向监护notarized.
 
Li Yinhe: I think this approach is definitely a step forward. One of the reasons so many people want to pass a same-sex marriage law now is that he/she/they want to be able to have legal authority if their partner falls seriously ill. This is a step down that road, and in the future, true same-sex marriage will have even more rights, including property inheritance.
 
As a happy accident, the One-Child Policy improved the status of women
 
Interface: Currently, some men think that women are overly sensitive and always want to lord it over men, and the Internet is constantly lambasting what they call "vampire feminists 田园女权."[3] What do you think of this anti-feminist wave?
 
Li Yinhe: I think this kind of criticism is basically opposed to the idea of gender equality. The rising status of women in many ways is a matter of catching up—men used to be superior to women, now men and women are equal. Many men are afraid that things will be reversed, and women will be seen as superior to men, but this is surely not what will happen. People in favor of feminism are not asking that women be superior to men, but are instead demanding true equality.
 
Interface: In your view, is there serious sexism in academia?
 
Li Yinhe: Looking at awards, promotions, and professional titles, I would say that there is no sexism, or that gender discrimination is not obvious.
 
But male scholars on occasion collectively reveal a certain sexism on certain issues.  About twenty years ago, a certain number of sociologists proposed to “send women back home,” because the employment situation at the time was dire, and many men were losing their jobs, so their idea of a solution was to send women back home. This is too patriarchal!   When they said that, the female scholars blew up and joined together to attack the sociologists, which scared them to death.  They said they had never seen anything like it, but that’s because they were wrong.  If the employment situation is severe, you can let capable people work and send those with low ability home, but you can't send an entire gender home.
 
Interface: How can we build a truly gender-equal society?
 
Li Yinhe: This takes a long, long time. First of all, people’s views must change. There is a theory in sociology called “cultural lag”, which means that economics and politics are relatively easy to change, but culture is hard.  Gender perceptions are something that is hard to change.
 
For example, some Chinese people want to have boys and look down on girls, which is obvious in many families; for women in some places, whether a child is born male or female affects her status in the family. There is really no way around this gender preference. I've seen tons of examples of this in my previous research trips to rural areas, and the discrimination against girls in the villages is even more pronounced. From the time they are born, it is clear that parents provide less love, attention, nutrition, and schooling opportunities than for boys. There are also some special customs, such as the Hebei-Shandong area where women are still not allowed to eat at the table. It takes a long time to change this kind of thing.
 
There was another example in my survey that was quite painful to hear: there was a girl whose parents always gave the best food to her brothers, and she ate the worst. Then there was a flood, and a relief agency sent some beef to help out people in need, and the girls parents fed her the beef, taking none for themselves.  The girl was so moved and happy that she ate her fill and fell asleep. When the girl woke up the next morning, her family said, “She’s fine, we can eat it too”. Turns out they suspected the beef might be poisonous, so they let the girl try it first.
 
I do think that the one-child policy has improved the status of women in all one-child families, even if that wasn’t the intention. Look how much the girl played by Yao Chen was bullied in the TV series "It's All Good"! But with the one-child policy, there is only this one child, and you have to give her all the resources, all the attention and all the love, which was an unexpected result. 
 
Scholars should be society’s “watchdogs”
 
Interface: You have been an active participant and advocate of various social movements for many years, you have mentioned that the characteristic of your generation is that you must engage with the world. What should the relationship between intellectuals and the public be like?
 
Li Yinhe: I have always felt that those of us in the social sciences should be society’s “watchdogs.”  If you are in the natural sciences, it doesn’t matter, you can just shut your door and do your research. But if some thing or some opinion is outrageously wrong, you should engage with it and try to correct it, you should spread your knowledge about the problem with society.
 
For example, many Chinese people’s view of  masturbation is stuck in the 18th century. For example, the “shit-slinging mothers “泼粪大妈”[4] and the anti-pornography network once said: "Li Yinhe actually thinks masturbation is harmless!" The theory that masturbation is harmful was put forward by a group of doctors in France and other European countries in the 18th century, and even today there are still people who think like this. Someone has to speak out and correct these things, because if the right ideas aren’t out there, wrong ideas will proliferate. There are people who listen to these anti-pornographers.  They set up online “quit sex bars” and go to schools to spread their propaganda. 
 
Interface: In the past, you mainly communicated with the public through lectures or articles in newspapers and journals, but now you participate in many online public events. What kind of posture do you think intellectuals should adopt vis-à-vis the public in today's social media era?
 
Li Yinhe: In addition to writing books and articles, I am now also doing self-publishing. I've been blogging since 2005, and I also use my WeChat feed to do some Q & A, or to share some video or audio clips, to circulate certain ideas in my field.
 
Interface: You have been slandered and personally attacked on the Internet. How did you deal with this problem?
 
Li Yinhe: When I first started blogging, people yelled at me in the comments section. I was sensitive at first, so I closed down the comments, but after a while, I opened them up again...I did this three times, and later I stopped paying attention and decided simply not to look at them.
 
One time when I was flipping through the comments I happened upon a comment that said “If killing people in China wasn't illegal, I'd really like to stab you to death." I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read it, but ever since then I just laugh off all the attacks. I think in an anonymous environment, people sometimes have to vent, have to get things off their chest.  Maybe somebody has been bullied by their wife, or yelled at by their boss, and they wind up taking it out on someone else on line, so you shouldn’t get too worked up about it.
 
Previously, before I retired, people would also call the Academy of Social Sciences, where I worked. There were two types of callers, those calling to fight and those calling to ask for advice. I remember my office-mates saying, “Our office phone has turned into your private hotline!” Sometimes people would send protest letters, and the one I remember most was from a man named David or Martin or something, so obviously it was someone religious.[5] He sent me a book written by an American, about this American who went to hell and then was tortured and wrote a whole book about it. The one who sent it to me told me that God says gays are going to hell, and if you speak up for gays, you’d better be careful or you’ll go there too.
 
Interface: There must be a lot of people who support you though, right?
 
Li Yinhe: Yes, there are still a lot of supporters, and there are actually very few that yell at me.
 
I have almost finished reading all of Higashino Keigo’s books
 
Interface: Are you satisfied with your current retirement life? What are planning next?
 
Li Yinhe: I think I’ve about written my fill of novels on sadomasochism, because I have written seven collections of short stories and two novels. But except for the three books already out there, I can’t publish the rest. But I still write from time to time. I write little essays, or currently I’m writing a collection of aphorisms, I write a few paragraphs every day, the rest of the time I read.
 
Interface: Do you mind telling us what books you are reading?
 
Li Yinhe: I read any good book I can find, and if I can read it to the end, that means it’s good.  The exception is detective novels, which can’t be considered “good books,” but they hold my attention because of the suspense.  I've read almost all of Keigo Higashino's[6] books, not to mention Sherlock Holmes.
 
I also like pure literature. We should read the books of any of the best authors. For example, people like Hetta Miller from East Germany and Bohumil Hrabal from Czech Republic are must-reads, I love these people.
 
Also, I now find that there are good works of fiction among British and American bestsellers. For example, A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, is not the kind of book that will go down in literary history, but I think it is also a high-quality work.
 
I also watch all kinds of films. I watch anything with a rating above 8 on iQiyi.  European, America, Korean, but not Chinese.
 
Interface: Can you recommend a book about love for us?
 
Li Yinhe: There is a book called I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus. This book is so strange, it is a novel written by an intellectual, and it seems like she uses the real names of real people! It’s about a couple playing a love game with another person, and it’s very interesting. 
 
Interface: I’ve seen some criticisms that your creativity has declined somewhat in recent years, and that the content of several published works is rather repetitive. What do you think of this criticism?
 
Li Yinhe: It is true that some people have made such criticism about my novels, and I have thought it over carefully. It seems to me that there are painters who specialize in one kind of painting, and there are also albums that feature this kind of painting from beginning to end. Many painters are like this, and this seems quite repetitive. I don’t know how to explain this—maybe this is the only thing that moves him/her? There are times when I think that it’s true, that when you get to a certain point you should just stop writing.
 
Interface: Do you have any future writing plans?
 
Li Yinhe: These days I’m really influenced by the American writer Lydia Davis. She is a great stylist and has created a form, her novels are sometimes just a paragraph or even a sentence, sometimes a page or two, and sometimes longer. She says, "Who can tell you how to write a novel?" If I were to write again in the future, I would probably be like Lydia Davis, writing a little bit of whatever comes to mind, and not writing if it doesn't.

Notes

[1]李银河, “相较于金钱和权力，爱情能给人最大的快乐,” online interview published on August 8, 2019 on the Interface/界面 website. 

[2]Translator’s note:  This is the rough equivalent of civil marriages, which do not exist in China.  It is a legal arrangement allowing members of a same-sex couple to take care of one another in the event of illness or incapacity.

[3]Translator’s note:  This is an Internet insult, an abbreviation for 中华田园女权(literally “native Chinese feminists”) a play on the term 中华田园犬 (“native Chinese dogs”), and refers to women who only pretend to be feminists so they can exploit men. 

[4]Translator’s note:  The reference is to an incident in 2014, when anti-pornography activists threw feces on sexologist Peng Xiaohui 彭晓辉 when he was giving a talk in Guangzhou.  See here for more information (in Chinese).

[5]Translator’s note:  Li means a Chinese convert to Christianity who adopted a name from the Christian tradition.

[6]Translator’s note:  A famous writer of detective novels in Japan, widely admired and read throughout Asia.