Liu Li, aged 27, is a college graduate from a village in Sichuan province. She came to Beijing and got a good job in a trading company. Her manager, a married man, asked her to accompany him to entertain foreign clients, and told her she would have to learn how to drink alcohol.
One night she got drunk, and the manager seduced her. "He was my first man," she said. "Afterwards he kept forcing himself on me and I felt no better than a prostitute."
His wife found out, and she had to leave the company. Now Li works for a much lower salary in another firm. She met and fell in love with another man, also from a village, who believed that a woman who had sex had before marriage was a whore. Before her wedding night she went to a doctor and had her hymen stitched so that her husband thought she was still a virgin. But she is terrified he might find out some day.
Hui Juan (32) was happily married to a Beijing news agency executive who travelled a lot. One evening when he was away, she accepted a lift home from a "charming, easy-going" colleague, also married. The two made love in her apartment without putting the lights on. They continued to meet secretly until her husband found out and divorced her.
Hui rented a small house for continued love trysts with her colleague. She got pregnant, and then he began to avoid her. She went to confront him in front of his wife. "Make your choice," she said. He would not leave his wife. She got an abortion, emigrated, and now lives with a man in San Francisco.
Liu Feng (28) and his wife do not get on. When he complained about her going out alone at night and spending money she mockingly calls him a "green-cap" (cuckold). He thinks she is ashamed of him. He was sacked from a good job as an accountant because he fiddled the books to buy her expensive presents.
Now she earns more than he does. He is sorry he married her. He only did so because they had sex before marriage and after her second abortion "she looked so pale I vowed to look after her for ever".
These three people are typical of the hundreds of upwardly mobile Chinese people interviewed by Beijing author Zhang Jieying about marriage, divorce, heartbreaks and adultery. She has published her research in a best-seller called (not very accurately) Absolute Privacy.
The book offers a unique insight into sexual relationships among the new Chinese, as they shake off the cult of uniformity and embrace Western individualism. China's divorce rate is still low by Western standards, but is rising, up from 4 per cent in 1970 to 13 per cent today. Married women are now more willing to have affairs, empowered by the larger salaries and sense of independence which is available to women in the booming service economy. Many married men on business trips turn to the thousands of hostesses in bordellos and karaoke bars ready to relieve their loneliness for a fistful of yuan.
The number of sex workers in cities has been swollen by unemployment and "excess" women fleeing from life in villages. Things have reached the point where conservatives in the government are worried about a moral collapse and believe a bit of social engineering is called for.
The Civil Affairs Ministry has drafted amendments to the 1980 marriage law, with some long overdue provisions such as dealing with spousal abuse. But, like the now-defunct Irish law of criminal conversation, the revised law would make adultery a crime and fidelity a legal requirement. Mistresses or male lovers would have to pay damages to the wronged spouse in case of a divorce.
Instead of allowing easy divorce, granted after 30 days simply by informing a neighbourhood committee of "loss of affection", couples should first be separated for three years. "Illicit sexual partners" would be investigated. In Guangzhou, officials have even suggested that men who cohabit with concubines or support mistresses be sent to re-education camps.
The response has been unusually hostile and outspoken, with normally timid editorial writers leading a chorus of objections. "Even law cannot assure that every marriage will have a happy ending, especially when passion fades or turns into bitterness," wrote a commentator in the China Daily. He pointed out that surveys showed a big number of married Chinese people were unfaithful, which meant the law could not be enforced and, if it was, many couples would simply live together outside marriage. The officials of the Civil Affairs Department should not lose heart. A survey revealed that most Chinese teenagers are still against extramarital sex. Conducted by the Horizon polling company, it showed that three-fifths of young people agree that those who destroy other people's marriages by having an affair should be punished financially or by other means.
The poll also turned up a revealing, and alarming, statistic. Asked what they believed were the "most unbearable" types of behaviour between the sexes, a quarter of the 8,000 respondents cited "forced sex within marriage". Which presents Zhang with a subject for a whole new field of research for her next book.