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In the cities, however, the marriage restrictions are more severely enforced; many single workers live in segregated dormitories. Opportunities for courtship are limited, although, now that the rigors of the Cultural Revolution have subsided, young couples are once again allowed to stroll hand in hand in the streets or even cuddle on benches. Secluded areas of public parks are increasingly used for after-dark trysts.
Still, the official moralistic ethic—it might almost be called Puritan—prevails. China's leaders inveigh against the licentious life-style of the imperial past. When Mao's widow Chiang Ch'ing first came under attack, she was frequently portrayed as a latter-day Empress Wu Tse-t'ien, whose career began in the 7th century as a 13-year-old court concubine and ended in an orgy of sex and assassination. Another execrated royal personage is the 8th century Emperor Hsüan Tsung, who was hopelessly enamored of a shapely concubine, Yang Kuei-fei. With characteristic Chinese panache, he built a summer palace for her with 16 bathing pools, where the lady was wont to wash her statuesque limbs under the Emperor's besotted gaze.
Mao's overriding ambition was to rid China of all traces of its decadent past, while at the same time transforming the Chinese national character. His instrument was a vast totalitarian party and police apparatus that reaches into every facet of daily life, that controls what a Chinese can read, where he can travel, how he should live. Despite the omnipresence of this Orwellian machinery, many practices of the feudal past are observed. In the privacy of their homes, there are many peasant families who still pray to Kuan-yin, the goddess of mercy, and burn incense to their ancestors. Ouija boards are regularly consulted to foretell the future. On the communes, matchmakers arrange marriages and would-be bridegrooms pay traditional bride prices, although now with a socialist tinge: an industrious girl who earns many work points (on which salaries in communes are based) brings a better price than a more indolent maiden. Even in the supposedly sophisticated cities, people often visit abandoned temples to pray for the success of some endeavor.
As Sinologists eagerly point out, comprehending China's present is impossible without knowing China's past. For example, the dramatic change from the inward-looking policies of Mao's last years to Teng's Great Leap Outward can be seen as merely the latest chapter in a 100-year-old struggle between xenophobic conservatives and Westernizing pragmatists. Reaching further back into history, China has regularly alternated cycles of philistine authoritarianism with eras of great learning and reform.