Sex Education as a Medium to Convey Appropriate Sexual Knowledge and Values to Women to Promote Gender Equality: What can the People’s Republic of China Learn from Western Countries? A Narrative Literature Review

Abstract

This work was produced in the context of a twenty-first century in which sexually transmitted diseases were raging around the world. China was one of the affected countries and sex education was widely recognised as a way to solve this problem. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (also known as New China), the development of sex education had gone through various stages, but due to the influence of China's traditional culture it had developed slowly and irregularly. Although Chinese society was still dominated by men it was undeniable that the social status of women had gradually improved and the proportions of women in both work and education were rising, while the sexual values of young Chinese people were also changing, as China's reform and opening up policy introduced new Western ideas and concepts, and the current global economic and cultural ties are getting closer and closer, consistent with changes in society. Against the background of these facts this work used a narrative literature analysis to study how sex education in China could serve as a medium to convey new sexual knowledge, reform sexual values and promote gender equality amongst Chinese women. It emerged that the development of sex education in China was slow, the content of policy was not standardised and there were few relevant studies related to sex education and women.