Supermarkets on several university campuses in Shanghai are giving away free notebooks containing sex education lessons to students.

About 50,000 such books have been available in some 100 university supermarkets since mid October. Most have been distributed.

This is the first time that sex education material has been given to students at the start of a new semester.

The books were printed up by the local sales agency for Durex condoms.

Company official Fu Guipeng said, "It is important to teach young students about sex when they start their college life, since sex is no longer a taboo on campus and more students are trying it."

The firm and the Shanghai Disease Prevention and Control Center are organizing a student bike ride around the city to promote AIDS prevention knowledge on World AIDS Day on December 1.

"Freshmen face an entirely different environment, which is more open and free than the middle school. Since more student couples are living together, it is useful to learn sex information to protect themselves from unexpected pregnancy," said Zhang Honghai, a graduate student at Fudan University.

"When I was an undergraduate, there were no sex courses. So the only way to learn about sex and relieve our curiosity was the Internet," said Gu Xiaodong, a graduate student at Jiaotong University.

(Eastday.com November 14, 2005)