Oct
31
Property Rights Helping Along Gay Life in China? Other Freedoms Can’t Be Far Behind
Filed Under China, Personal Freedom | 1 Comment
On his blog, Tom Palmer from the Cato Institute points to an essay from the China Daily on the difficulty of being gay in China. From the essay:
Last November, government agencies published a report that put the number of gay men in China who are “of a sexually active age” at 5-10 million. Scientists say this is the low end of the estimate. They figure that there are around 30-40 million homosexual men and women in total.
In 1997, China’s Criminal Law decriminalized sodomy. In 2001, homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders by health authorities.
But the changing law does not necessarily change public perception. Most gay people interviewed for this story agree that the single biggest source of pressure and stigma comes from their own families. “My employer doesn’t care about my private life, and the neighbourhood grandma is not nosy any more. But there’s no way I can get past my own mum and dad,” said Lu Youni, a Guangzhou high school teacher.
While a sypathetic piece, it does not quite tell the whole story. As Palmer notes on his blog, “It’s discreetly not mentioned, but the situation is infinitely preferable to the public executions to which gay people were sentenced in the old days. What’s missing from an otherwise interesting story is any explanation of why things have been changing in China.” Palmer then recounts a story:
My friend Zhou Xiao (those of us who have difficulty pronouncing Chinese names call her “Kate”) told me in Shanghai in 1997 that she was convinced that “China will never go communist again.” I asked her why she was so sure and she announced that she (and her very patient husband) had already been in Shanghai for a week doing field research on on changing public attitudes in China and they had found that “Shanghai is just full of gay bars. And when the gay bars come in, they’re never going back to socialism!” In her discussions with customers, she said that she asked what had accounted for the change (that was before the laws were amended to eliminate criminal penalites for sexual contact among members of the same gender) and she said that the response was that the big step had been privatization of housing. Under socialism, housing was rationed and allocated by the state. Married couples were eligible to be allocated flats; unmarried people were not. So gay people (who had not been forced into phony marriages) had to live with their parents or in worker dormitories and couldn’t create households together. When housing was privatized, however, “landlords didn’t care if you were purple and had horns, if you were willing to pay.” A little bit of the profit motive swept away a great deal of irrationality, cruelty, and oppression.
A fairly cheery story of the property rights necessary for China to at least partially un-shackle its economy from the misery of communism leading in turn to more personal freedom.
Hat tip to Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy for pointing the way to Palmer’s ineresting post.
Comments
1 Comment so far
Given the climate in this country I am surprise to hear any supportive words for the Gay Community in China.