Li Yinhe on Chinese attitudes towards homosexuality: ten questions

She just finished some kind of survey, sample size=400, and homosexuality, china, chinese, gay, lesbian, survey, li yinhe

Here are some of the results {homosexual(ity)=hs from here on in b/c I am trying to finish this post ASAP}:

1. 20% of Chinese people think there is nothing wrong with HS. 30% think that it is “a little wrong” but not completely wrong, and 40% think it’s completely wrong.

2. Only 7.5% of the people interviewed said they knew someone that was HS.

3. Third question asked if they’d be friends with a HS. Over 60% of them said yes, and only 30% said no way.

4. This question asked if an openly HS person could be a school teacher. THose opposed numbered slightly more than those that would accept a gay teacher.

5. This question asked: if you found out your kid’s teacher was gay, would you ask them to change teachers. The percentages here were close to that in #4, with slightly more than half of respondents saying they would prefer that teacher be changed (which probably means fired if need be).

6. Do you think that gay-themed movies or TV shows ought to be openly shown in China? Here there were basically two camps: the 55% that thought they should be and the 40-plus percent that didn’t.

7. In terms of legal and political rights: 91% said that they ought to have equal employment rights. They said this because employment is how people make a living and feed their families. Even those that don’t really support HS in general don’t want to take away the HS community’s means of survival.

8. If a family member is HS: totally accepting was 10%, totally rejecting 10%, and about 75% of the people said “would tolerate but hope that they would change”. (personal note: that’s a pretty lame attitude)

9. HS marriage: not quite 30% said they would support it and 70% said they were against it. This was quite different form what was found on an internet survey, where 60% of the people said they supported it (my note: people do random shit on the internet, because it doesn’t matter, while on the other hand, people are often more honest since they are anonymous and have none of the social pressure that would cause them to lie.) Of course, Li notes that this has to do with the netizen demographic, which is more young, educated, and concentrated in developed areas.

10. The most fundamental of questions: do you think that heteros and homos are equal individuals? Li says that something more concrete, like the right to work or survival, is going to get more supporters while something more abstract, like “equality” (whether before the law or the ICC or God) is harder for some people to get. That’s why the percentage here is just over 80%.

I won’t translate all of Li’s concluding remarks here, but sheseems to think that in general, China fared better than some might have thought from a society that has its fair share of social conservatives. I also didn’t translate the stats she includes from the US and Hong Kong, which I gather are from some kind of similar survey using similar questions, which she uses to compare China’s level of tolerance or rather just attitudes towards HS. She thinks that overall, China fared pretty well compared to more open societies, at least considering where it’s at now, and hopes that in the near future there will indeed be a greater acceptance of HS as well as greater recognition and protection of their fundamental political and legal rights as human beings.