When Lao Li was a boy, sex was never discussed at home or school.

Little wonder, then, a visit to Shanghai's Sex Culture Museum with its exhibits of 1,000-year-old dildos and Ming dynasty pornographic porcelain stunned him.

"It's the first time I've seen anything like this," said 30-something Li. "This should be taught at secondary school. Not even my parents taught me about sex."

In pre-communist China, sex was less a taboo than it became under former leader Mao Zedong, whose own highly active -- and disease-ridden -- love life was chronicled by his doctor in a book banned in China.

Under Mao, sex was officially a matter of doing one's reproductive duty for the state. He wanted a new labor force to build a new country and the state encouraged high birth rates.

Since then, the government has embarked upon a stern family planning policy to control a booming population -- the world's largest -- but official attitudes toward sex remain puritan, though they are changing slowly.

They need to change faster, health experts say.

There has been a huge rise in pre-marital and teenage sex. According to state media, 70 percent of urban youth admitted to having premarital sex in 2004, up from just 15 percent in 1989.

HIV/AIDS in China is now increasingly spreading via sexual transmission, which risks exacerbating a problem that already afflicts an estimated 650,000 Chinese.

Ignorance and fear are widespread.

State media has said that some 70 percent of unmarried male migrant workers do not use condoms, and of the 6 million commercial sex workers in China, only a fifth or so use protection.

"Sixty percent of young people in China think you can get HIV by sharing chopsticks with someone," lamented Ken Legins, head of UNICEF's HIV/AIDS program in the country.

SEXUAL MISSION

But Liu Dalin, a retired sociology lecturer from Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University and the curator of the city's sex museum, has made it his mission to educate.

"Making love shows you have culture," the sexagenarian Liu told Reuters. "People have two natures, one like an animal and the other cultural -- animals have no culture.

"If you don't teach, then people are just like animals, but if you teach then they can have culture," he said.

"But right now sex education is a serious problem here. Even in the old days, mothers would teach daughters."

Liu's crusade has been a long-term ambition, yet progress has been slow.

Although he gives sex education classes in universities, Liu has yet to be allowed into schools. One Shanghai secondary school that had considered taking students to Liu's museum decided against it after a few teachers went for a preview.

"Some of the exhibits were actually quite enlightening," the head teacher was quoted as saying in the official China Daily, but she thought certain exhibits inappropriate for teenagers.

"People should really be learning about sex from day dot," said Liu. "Young children need to understand that sex is a very natural and frequent activity -- natural, healthy, scientific. Eating is the most natural activity, and next is sex."

But Liu is no free-love Chinese hippie. For him, sex is best suited to marriage, or at least to monogamy, and to people over the age of 20.

"You shouldn't pluck an apple before it is ripe, or else it tastes bad," he said.

WHORE OF THE ORIENT

Liu's home city of Shanghai was known in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Whore of the Orient" for its boisterous, "anything goes" brothels and lascivious night life, a past it is today slowly rediscovering as people throw off the Maoist straitjacket.

But many agree with Liu that education needs to be improved.

Organizers of a recent HIV/AIDS forum in Beijing showed a video in which a China Family Planning Association official admitted that in 27 years of working in the field, she still found it hard to talk about sex.

University student Xiao Song said her parents never taught her about sex. She said she and her classmates watched a Japanese video about sex at school aged 12, but they were given no opportunity to ask questions afterwards.

"China needs to work on the widespread misunderstanding of sex, the lack of teaching materials and on the negative approach to youngsters involved in sexual activity," said Song.

Not all Chinese grow up with sex as a taboo. In the matriarchal Mosuo tribe in southwest China's Yunnan province, women traditionally move into their own house -- and choose between their suitors -- from the age of 13.

"When you take in a man, you spend a night with him and, if he performs well, you keep one of his gifts inside the house so that he knows he can return," said Yang Erche Namu, a Mosuo who has won fame in China as a pop star, model and writer.

Police in the Chinese financial hub of Shanghai broke up a news conference by a group of haemophiliacs who say they contracted HIV/AIDS through contaminated blood transfusions, an activist said on Thursday. Journalists were detained and police surrounded the hotel where the event was taking place, said Wan Yanhai, the widely respected director of the Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education.

Calls to the Shanghai city government and police were not answered.

The group has been demanding compensation but the government has stymied legal efforts to sue the company they say provided the infected blood products, Wan said.

"We strongly and angrily condemn the Shanghai police for this action which seriously encroaches on the rights of citizens to free expression," Wan said in a statement.

Last year, the central government said it would severely punish those responsible for serious diseases transmitted by transfusions. The move followed several cases in which people were infected after receiving blood sold by HIV carriers.

But health workers and AIDS activists say blood for transfusions is still not routinely tested for the disease.

Political sensitivity and social stigma still surround AIDS in China, and the government's slowness to acknowledge the epidemic contributed to its spread, especially in the central province of Henan, where in the 1990s millions sold blood to unsanitary clinics.

There were about 25,000 deaths from AIDS across China in 2005. In January, Beijing lowered by around 30 percent the estimated number of people living with HIV/AIDS to 650,000, yet warned against complacency, saying the figure was still rising with many people unaware of the danger.

President Vladimir Putin ordered officials on Friday to tell Russians about the dangers of AIDS, as the Kremlin pours new money into tackling a disease experts say it has failed to take seriously enough.

Russia's levels of HIV-infection are nothing like as high as in sub-Saharan Africa, but health charities say the proportion of infected Russians has nearly doubled since 2001.

"According to official figures, the number of HIV-infected people has exceeded 342,000, and experts think it is much higher. In the main these are people below 30 years old," Putin told a gathering of top officials.

"We need to constantly explain to people the danger and high risk of catching HIV. Above all, it is important to work with high-risk groups. So far we do not have a common strategy of this."

This year Russia is to spend $175 million on HIV/AIDS programs, up from $5 million last year.

President Vladimir Putin has promised to put AIDS high on the agenda when leaders of the Group of Eight meet in Russia later this year.

A U.N. report in 2004 said AIDS could kill 20 million Russians and cost 14 percent of GDP by the middle of the century if Moscow did not do more to fight the disease, which has no cure.

The report said the epidemic was now spreading faster in eastern Europe than anywhere else in the world.

Charities say groups that have been traditionally seen as being at low risk are now contracting the disease in growing numbers.

In Moscow in 2000, drug use caused over 80 percent of infections and heterosexual sex just 10 percent. By 2004 the proportions were nearly half and half.

But HIV is still little understood in Russia, which was closed to immigration under Communist rule and hence affected later than other European countries.

The disease is often seen as a foreign import that affects only drug abusers and prostitutes.

A Russian Orthodox archbishop this week was quoted as saying that a church-run HIV treatment center in Moscow had proved that prayer could cure HIV-positive people if "they restore harmony between soul and body."

This week, the Moscow City Council moved to ask Putin to ban foreign health charities from AIDS projects in the capital because their handing out of free condoms and clean needles for injecting drugs undermined Russians' morality.

But Putin said foreign assistance was crucial to stopping the disease becoming an epidemic and hitting Russia's already declining population numbers.

"At the moment, this is a concentrated illness, with the infection mainly in a few risk groups. But there is a risk of the infection leaving these groups," he said.

An Indian marriage bureau that specializes in bringing together people with HIV said it was struggling because it had only one woman on its books and almost 170 men.

The Swastik Marriage Bureau, responsible for three marriages in less than a year, said it had registered nearly 170 men with HIV but blamed "shyness" for being unable to link them with Indian women.

Founder Rajesh Purohit said only one woman, a call-centre employee in her mid 20s and single, was currently searching for a mate through his agency based in Pune in western Maharashtra state.

The three women already married were widows who had been infected with HIV by their dead husbands, he said.

"Women in India are shy to come forward with such a kind of business," said Purohit, 32, who does not charge for his services.

He said he was inspired by a television documentary about a woman who was infected by her husband who had kept his HIV status secret.

"I don't want anyone hiding their disease. This way, it could make the man's life easier and wouldn't spoil anyone else's."

Most of the men with HIV came forward by themselves while the families of women contacted his agency, he said. Most of his clients are middle class office workers.

After South Africa India has the world's second largest number of people infected with HIV with more than 5.13 million, according to UN figures.

But with a population of more than one billion, only six of its 29 states including Maharashtra have an HIV prevalence of more than one percent.

In spite of a national campaign that tells Indians to "Fear HIV, not the HIV patients", ignorance about how the disease spreads leads many to avoid contact with carriers.