GLR November-December 2023

beautiful, stylish set called the wanghong . “I have been observing them silently. Those well-dressed and elegant wanghong ... are my future goal, and they are my idols. Even though when I meet some of them, I think they are idiots!” But hovering over these young men, this book argues, is the political situation,

which leads one to ask: Then in what sense is one “queer,” in the new or old sense of the word? The modern version of homo sexuality in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan all seem to be the antithesis of rebellious, different, alienated. Even the legalization of gay marriage in Taiwan is not seen as a concession to dif

SEXUALITY AND THE RISE OF CHINA ThePost 1990s Gay Genera ti on in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China by Travis S. K. Kong Duke Univ. Press. 257 pages, $25.95

ference. It is seen, both here and in Petrus Liu’s book, as mainly political—something that sets Taiwan apart from China as being more liberal, modern, forward-looking, international. The le galization of gay marriage is simply one more tool in the Tai wanese government’s struggle to maintain what Hong Kong has lost: its independence from Beijing—just another form of pinkwashing. On the mainland, homosexuality bothers the Communist Party only because the Party fears any social group that might initiate collective action against the government à la Tiananmen Square—the nightmare that Xi Jinping shares with Vladimir Putin, that one day a mob with pitchforks will storm the castle. What hangs over Sexuality and the Rise of China is the threat of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s the mainland, and Xi Jinping, that engenders fear. Perhaps that’s why Daniel, in Hong Kong, is the subject whose interview is the most haunt ing. It’s Daniel—who says that when he was studying in the UK, he spent a lot of time explaining to people the difference between Hongkongers and Chinese—who provides the most memorable of all the quotes: When I was young, I found China very backward. It was very dirty, smelly, and full of cockroaches. ... You could smell it when you crossed the border. ... It was a scary place ... things would be stolen, you didn’t know whether what you ate was safe or not, restaurants were dirty, and what pissed me off is that people didn’t care about all these [things]. ... But my par ents come from China. ... I wouldn’t say I hate mainlanders. I hate the government and its brainwashing, as a lot of people are being brainwashed. ... The major difference between Hong Kong and China is the system. Hong Kong has the rule of law. China does not. ... But the most important thing that Hongkongers have is integrity. We know what to do and what should be done and what shouldn’t. China does not [have that], maybe because they experienced the Cultural Revolution. ... People with integrity either died or were exiled. ... The rest are those who have no integrity, [who] just want to gain advan tages, [or are] indifferent or ignorant. So they do things just for their own self-interest and do not care about civil society or the common good. As I write, the news is full of stories about the possibility of an economic collapse in China. Young Chinese are having a dif ficult time finding work. And these college graduates, eleven million of them, are so discouraged, they’re no longer thinking about getting married or trying to succeed; they are instead doing something they call “lying flat”: making the very mini mum of effort to get by. Will gay liberation have any effect on these problems? Or will these problems make gay liberation ir relevant? One watches China, reads books like this, if only out of curiosity; how are they going to manage this society, what will gay liberation become in a country as authoritarian as China?

the difference in governments. In mainland China the policy toward homosexuality is called “the Three No’s”: “no encour aging, no discouraging, and no promoting.” But the pink econ omy is still subject to police raids, and Xi Jinping has denounced the presence of “sissy boys” in the entertainment world. For mainland Chinese tongzhi, gay life means the In ternet: the tedious task of cruising for hours online with noth ing to show for it. And even these sites can be shut down by the government. In Hong Kong, there is a considerable pink economy but no place to live on one’s own; though Hong Kong tongzhi arepros perous and sophisticated enough to travel abroad, they generally have to live, like Yojo, with their parents because of the high cost of real estate. In Taiwan, there is a sense of foreboding, if not doom, regarding the economic possibilities of their island, and China’s stated intention to do to Taipei what it has done to Hong Kong. Here is Daniel, a successful young Hongkonger who has studied in the UK: “Hong Kong is dying, on the verge of death.” Sexuality and the Rise of China is written in the language of sociology, but beneath the jargon one senses a startling thing: that while young gay people may dislike their government, they are not really in conflict with their parents or identity as Chi nese. They can’t be. When one is finished reading Kong’s sur vey one is struck by a great irony. Chinese culture is not going to change to make room for homosexuality; it is going to ab sorb homosexuality in what Kong calls “homonationalism,” a term that means, so far as I can tell, being gay but also a good, patriotic citizen. The LGBT person has not only to care for his parents in old age—especially on the mainland, where the gov ernment has chosen not to create anything like Medicare or So cial Security—but to work hard, to be successful and masculine. In other words, he must be totally conventional,

Touch I have never seen anyone touch a book like that before, like a lover whose fingers fail a body before leaving, one last tracing of skin upon skin, both careful and casual at the same time, the way a child’s hand hesitates on a petal or a butterfly’s wing, aware

all at once how they can crush the very thing they want to own.

M ARK E VAN C HIMSKY

TheG & LR

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