BEIJING • If all goes according to plan, this fall a girl somewhere in China’s Yunnan Province will tell her boyfriend she can’t have sex with him. And he’ll have an abstinence program from the United States to thank.In Yunnan schools this year, teachers are being trained with a sex education curriculum created by the Colorado Springs-based conservative Christian group Focus on the Family.The agreement with the Yunnan ministry of education is a milestone for Focus on the Family, which has struggled for four years to make inroads on abstinence in China.It is also the result of a narrow confluence of interests: Evangelical Christian groups want an entree into China. And Chinese authorities, despite the country’s official atheism, want help with controlling population growth and managing the society’s rapidly shifting values.Chinese society has undergone major changes in recent decades, with divorce rates climbing steadily and migration and modernization putting increasing pressure on families, sociologists say. Wading into those waters, Focus on the Family has tried to market its marriage- and family-oriented programs as solutions. But Communist Party officials have been suspicious, at times, of the group’s motivations.At an early demonstration of the abstinence curriculum two years ago — given to the Communist Youth League of China in Hangzhou — teens were supposed to end the seminar by making a virginity pledge, the hallmark of the Christian group’s abstinence program. But government officials quickly stepped in, insisting that the kids pledge to no one but the Communist Party.“It hasn’t been easy,” said Deanna Go, China outreach director for Focus. “Everything takes longer here.”Officials in Yunnan, however, said Focus on the Family’s message of abstinence resonated with the province’s conservative leadership.“Abstinence is good for keeping the families steady and bringing down the divorce rate,” said Ma Lianhong, Yunnan’s former secretary general of media, who introduced the Christian group to provincial leaders. “And it complies with China’s traditional morals.”Abstinence programs have generated considerable controversy in the United States and beyond. Critics point to research they say demonstrates that the approach is ineffective, and argue that efforts should be geared instead toward safe-sex education. But proponents say the strategy has the potential to reduce the rates of out-of-wedlock births and sexually transmitted diseases.In the past decade, Focus on the Family has found relative success with its abstinence program in other countries — notably majority Muslim nations such as Egypt and Malaysia, where its Christian brand of abstinence coincides with the teachings of Islam. Worldwide, the group says it has reached nearly 3 million teens.China, however, has proved a tough market to crack. Premarital sex has become common in its developed cities. Even in the more rural areas, experts say, sexual mores are changing at a rapid pace.“It’s hard convincing them to come to our training,” said Qian Honglin, founder of a nonprofit working with Focus on the Family in Beijing.The program, called “No Apologies,” took two years for staff to translate into Chinese, and another two years to pass through government regulations.Before the Yunnan deal, the program was mostly taught at occasional seminars by associated nonprofits in four major cities. The piecemeal approach reached only 9,000 students, program coordinators say.The new Yunnan agreement promises wider exposure. In the past week, 512 teachers from about half the school districts in the province were trained to teach the curriculum in seminars sponsored by the government.So how did Focus on the Family sell the government on its program? Like most things in China, it required a little guanxi, a term that translates roughly as having the right connections.In 2006, Yunnan officials, who had heard some of the long-running 90-second radio commentaries by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, inquired about airing them on their own station. That led provincial leaders to stop by Colorado during a 2007 tour of the United States.Provincial leaders told Dobson during their visit that they admired his strong stances on everything — marriage, parenting, gender issues, the sanctity of life. The only thing they disagreed with was evangelism, according to Go, the Focus on the Family official, who served as translator.To work in China, however, Focus on the Family has had to make a pledge of its own: no politically sensitive material, and no religion. The evangelical group says it’s strictly abiding by those terms.This week’s seminar was mostly financed by the province, and Focus on the Family supplied the training.

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