Minutes before Professor Liu Wenli was set to speak in a webinar on the development of sex education in China, she learned that the country's top legislative body had passed an amendment making sex education mandatory starting next year.
She quickly added a new slide on the change, according to her research group's WeChat account, with the amended law mandating the inclusion in school syllabuses of "sex education."
The three Chinese characters for the term can also be translated as "sexuality education," which Liu and her fellow advocates have long fought for. In 2017, a textbook series she edited was removed from a school after complaints about explicit content and that the books normalized homosexuality.