Sexual misconduct and punishment in Chinese hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s

This article analyzes the official circulars relating to the punishment of male physicians for sexual misconduct in Chinese hospitals during the 1960s and 1970s. It reveals how the puritanical and political ideology of this period affected the images of male physicians who engaged in sexual misconduct, and argues that their punishment demonstrates how the social responsibility for upholding sexual morality, a task once ascribed to women in imperial China, had shifted to men in socialist China. The circulars were a mechanism to impose a new 'socialist sexuality' on Chinese society in order to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party's moral authority and ruling legitimacy.