Those without their own apartments can turn to hourly rate motels. Dorm rooms in China are generally crowded with a half-dozen students each, while many follow tradition -- or economic necessity -- and live with their parents long after high school graduation.
On a lazy Sunday afternoon, one young woman flounced into the Cheng Lin Ming Guang Hotel, beau in tow, brushing past another couple in the lobby to negotiate loudly with the receptionist for her favorite room (No. 112) and a break on the rate -- 90 yuan (US$12) for three hours.
At a shabby basement hotel around the corner, where every room is decorated with a poster of a scantily clad Western woman, a young couple straightened the sheets and blanket before leaving. A sign on the wall warned: "If the linens are too dirty, you will lose your deposit."
Families and schools remain shy about sex, and teenage sex has flourished in the gap between awkward discussions and silence.
Psychologist Deng Jun fields 15 to 20 calls a day, mostly about sex, on a hot line for teens she runs out of her office, tucked in a corner of the fifth floor of the dingy Beijing No. 2 Hospital. Most of her callers are high school or college age. Sometimes they are as young as 10.
"With society opening up, our attitudes about sex are changing," the 52-year-old said.
Adults "don't approve of premarital sex ... because when you have sex, it brings a series of unavoidable problems. These problems, as they increase, become society's problems," she said.
A vocational high school in Xinjiang, a region about 2,400km west of Beijing, briefly enacted a rule last year requiring female students to take pregnancy tests as part of their annual school physical. An outcry about privacy forced the school to retreat.
Abortion is readily available and viewed as a much better alternative to the searing shame of being an unwed teenage mother in China.
A walk-in abortion costs 1,000 yuan at the Haidian Maternal and Child Health Hospital, a large public hospital in northwest Beijing. Skip the anesthesia and the price falls to 400 yuan.
Still, the rising number of abortions among younger Chinese alarms educators, who blame outdated sex education. Students learn about sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS, but the discussions about sex itself are vague and condom use is rarely addressed.
"They don't talk directly about sexual relations," Li said. "If you don't talk directly about sex, it's an incomplete sex education."
Blogger "Bamboo Shadows" embodies the contradictions of a changing China, with one foot entrenched in traditional values and the other swinging forward toward a modern kind of free love.
On her site, the Beijing resident openly discusses her breasts, orgasms and struggles to control arousal during yoga classes. But the husky-voiced tech worker, who refused to give her real name in an interview, illustrated in one posting that even in an increasingly permissive China, standards still exist.
She had wrapped her arm around her boyfriend's waist while riding on the back of his bicycle, caressing him as he pedaled the streets of the Chinese capital.
But later, she wrote: "He wanted to be very affectionate in public. I refused. I said we had just eaten and hadn't brushed our teeth."
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