ABSTRACT
This chapter examines young people’s other-sex relations across the three generations. The generational change constitutes an expressive turn with a Chinese twist. Individual emotional self-fulfillment, which seemed irrelevant to their grandparents but increasingly important for their parents, especially the mothers – but mainly in marriage, is now an important component of being young for the daughters and sons and for their expectations of adulthood. For the young generation, teen romance has become normal and other-sex relations are no longer closely related to marriage, as it was for their parents and especially their grandparents. But paralleling the rise of romantic love for the two younger generations, there is especially for the young generation a strong emphasis on pragmatic reasoning in choice of marriage partner. The young generation has become both more romantic and more means-ends rational than their grandparents and parents were. For them, expressive love and instrumentality can and should be combined. There has been a demystification of the body, sexuality and reproduction in the young generation. In contrast with the older generations, they showed knowledgeability and open-mindedness about sexuality, reproduction and premarital sex while still valuing female virginity and largely disapproving of sex at school or outside marriage.
