Love is in the air these days in China, and on the air, and on the Internet. In a country where not so long ago handholding in public was regarded as bourgeois, couples now display their affections openly, even managing, as I saw the other day, to embrace while cycling together along a busy road.
Young Chinese people queue to take part in new television dating games, they find romance on Website chat rooms, and avidly follow ground-breaking television soap operas about love in the work-place.
So it was no surprise last week to see that China has hijacked yet another Western custom and adopted St Valentine's Day as a full-blown national event. Flower-sellers had a field day (no pun intended) last Monday as people bought St Valentine's Day bouquets for their loved ones.
I know of an airforce officer who drove his wife, Xiao Hong, 10 miles to work in a Beijing school office on St Valentine's Day, then appeared back a couple of hours later with a big bouquet of roses, and to cap it all took her for dinner that night.
The big stores have got in on the act with Valentine cards and heart-shaped chocolate boxes. In upmarket shops, anyone who bought jewellery on Monday was given a free red rose. The post office in the city of Xi'an in north-west China issued a set of postcards with golden double-heart postmarks and a famous love poem from the Song Dynasty, making St Valentine's Day semi-official.
Mind you, the most populated country on Earth has a lot of catching up to do in the game of love, if the results of worldwide research on sexual satisfaction, released for St Valentine's Day, are anything to go by. Only nine per cent of Chinese people aged 18 or over said they were "very happy" with their sex lives. This compared with an average of 19 per cent for the 30 countries surveyed in the Roper Starch Worldwide poll.
The only place more erotically challenged (apart from Russia) was Hong Kong, where a mere 5 per cent of people expressed themselves "very happy" with bedtime performances. Can it have been something to do with the withdrawal of the British?
The Venezuelans incidentally are the world's best lovers with a 46 per cent rating in the survey.
Television dating games with names like Square of Hearts, Tonight We Meet, Fantastic Men and Women and Romance for Ever have become very popular in China. A typical episode will involve six young men and women, "all of them gorgeous and presentable, and not laid-off workers or anything like that", as a guest presenter told me.
The contestants are asked old-fashioned questions like "What would you cook for your boyfriend?" or more probing inquiries like "What will you do when your spouse commits adultery?" The two who give the most "correct" answers are judged to be the winning couple and the programme ends with a little lecture from the presenter on the merits of true love. There are no prizes like a free weekend together, though one set of winners got engaged three months later.
These programmes open up a touchy subject, the increase in extramarital affairs in China, which now account for one-third of the soaring number of divorces.
Adultery was the subject of a special TV documentary on CCTV which revealed that couples before 1980 were primarily concerned about having children, whereas in today's rapidly changing society, romance figures much more highly in people's calculations. One in four marriages now end up in divorce courts compared with less than one in 20 two decades ago.
Another big hit on television is a 21-episode soap opera made by a Hong Kong company called Love Talks, about romances in the modern Chinese surroundings of an imaginary Shanghai advertising office (the middle-aged male accountant wants to start an affair with a new account executive).
Love Talks even has a Website (www.ChineseE.com/Love Talks). The Internet is fast taking the place of traditional Chinese matchmakers. In December when a California-based company, run by Taiwanese entrepreneurs, launched an e-commerce site in China, 10,000 Romeos and Juliets signed up to its Lovetown Website within a week.
Despite all the romance attached to February 14th, Chinese soothsayers warned against getting married on that date, as it is a "day for calamity", and recommend February 27th as the most propitious day in this Year of the Dragon.
But back to Hong Kong, where people are so woefully bad at love-making. The Lan Kwai Fong restaurant group is doing its bit to rectify things. Guests at the restaurants on Monday found little Valentine's Day packets on each table tied with red ribbon. Inside were miniature bottles of cologne and perfume - and a banana-flavoured condom. As a columnist in a local paper observed: "No one can say the gift was tasteless."