From time to time, the Chinese-language press runs so-called surveys about the attitude of college students to sex. Mind-boggling figures are quoted from little-known sources and minus survey methods to show how today's young people can be candid, if not casual, about what were no-no's for their parents.

From the People's Daily website alone there are reports alleging that 70 percent of college students don't mind sharing a dorm room or flat with someone of the opposite sex, or 60 percent of them do not object to pre-marital sex, while only 40 or so percent of them had any sex education before they entered college.

The scientific quality of these surveys is always debatable. But that is not the issue. No one is arguing about those figures like economists do with CPI, GDP, M1 and M2.

In fact, in the eyes of every older generation, children always tend to be running wild and hard to control. They don't have fun in the old ways, and their new ways sometimes arouse unbearable scenarios in the minds of their elders.

The contrast could hardly be more apparent in a country constantly in change. It was not until the late 1970s, when a society that had once been both passionately revolutionary and stoic was recovering its common sense, that "talking romance" (the Chinese for dating) could be seen in public places such as parks and movie theaters.

Our black-and-white photo is a park scene in Chengdu, a major city in Sichuan province, which shows how young people used to act with self-restraint and a carefully managed distance between themselves when they dated in 1978; although just a few years earlier, in the early 1970s, what they were doing might just as well have had them accused of being "improper" at a time when all people were supposed to be spending their time at somber political meetings.

The behavior of today's youngsters must make their parents blush, but the kids couldn't care less, especially in festival times as shown by our color photo taken on a 21st-century Christmas Eve.

But the young can have their fun precisely because their parents, some of them the "romance-talkers" in the 1970s, began the change.

(China Daily 09/15/2008 page1)