Like their predecessors, Communist officials initially placed strict restrictions on birth control and abortion, encouraging high fertility rates. Focusing on the early years of the People’s Republic from 1949 until the Great Leap Forward, this chapter shows that even in this constrained environment, literature on sex and birth control continued to be published, promoting disparate narratives on sexuality and fostering diverse local contraceptive practices. The need to more fully mobilize women’s labor led to a gradual loosening of birth control limitations. Yet, the availability of information about sex, as well as access to birth control, abortions, and sterilizations, differed dramatically according to location, class, and education level.

The fall of the Qing dynasty was followed by the successive creation of two republics: the Republic of China (‘ROC’), established in 1912 and ultimately dominated by the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’), established in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party (‘CCP’) headed by Mao Zedong. Treatment of the two Chinas in the international arena could hardly have been more different. Never exercising more than nominal control over the entirety of the territory it claimed, the ROC was riven by an endless succession of warlords, an even greater number of Westerners holding onto semi-colonial privileges they claimed to have inherited from the Qing, a civil war between Nationalists and Communists, and a brutal occupation by Japan. Nevertheless, while there was no shortage of people in China rejecting the claims of the Nationalist Government, internationally no one doubted its legal existence, even when contradicted by facts.