THE Chinese New Year festival officially ends tomorrow, and many couples returning home to Beijing after the annual visit to their relatives will be turning their thoughts to the upcoming Western New Year and perhaps making a discreet call at a little shop between a shoe store and a greengrocer in the capital's busy Wangfujing Street.
This shop, called Adam and Eve, is one of the many "health suppliers" or "medical equipment centres" which have opened in China in recent months, what we in the West would call sex shops.
The white-coated staff dispense dragon-headed vibrators and aids to fertility such as love sprays which "avoid flagging". The managers say happily they expect business to pick up after people return from holiday because of a craze sweeping China about the alleged benefits of having a millennium baby, a child born just after midnight on January 1st, 2000.
Newspapers in China have been reporting that the best day to conceive a millennium baby is Friday, April 9th. The official Health News reported "excited young couples" hurrying to get married so they could try for a millennium baby, preferably a boy, of course.
Some women are taking extraordinary measures to try to hit the target date, such as Jiang Li (27), a woman who, according to the Beijing Youth Daily, had an abortion so she could time her pregnancy better.
Increased numbers of abortions have been reported from other cities for similar reasons in recent weeks, as rumours spread, often without foundation, that millennium babies will qualify for prizes ranging from huge sums of money to international passports.
The "excited young couples" may also be sitting up late at the weekends to tune in to Dr Ma Xiaonian's Sex Education Programme on national television, broadcast at the adults-only time of 1.40 a.m. on Sundays to explain the mysteries of sex, and dispel common misconceptions such as the idea that a couple can get pregnant by simply sleeping next to each other.
Ignorance about sex has been a problem in modern China, a hangover from the puritanical days of the Cultural Revolution. Not so many years ago everyone had to wear sexless Mao suits of grey cloth, and displays of affection such as hand-holding or kissing in public were forbidden.
With access to modern movies and videos, and a more relaxed commerce-driven atmosphere, to day's younger generation in the cities seems to know it all.
Bars and night-clubs do a thriving business and young couples now behave in public like their counterparts in other countries.
Sex has actually become big business. Once outlawed, prostitution has returned to the major towns and cities. The one-child policy has eased somewhat in recent years and foreign adoptions have lessened the strain on orphanages, giving rise to the phenomenon, as yet on a very small scale, of families breeding for profit.
The Wenhui Daily reported in February that police in the northern provinces of Shandong and Shanxi were trying to stamp out a trade in babies. So-called adoption agencies, which had previously found genuine abandoned babies for adoption, have started buying infants from couples out to make money by deliberately exceeding the government quota of one or two children.
The going rate is about £150 for a girl and £500 for a boy, the paper reported. And a millennium baby would undoubtedly fetch a much higher price.
The authorities are now getting a bit worried about what China Women's News describes as the "coming baby boom " of the year 2000.
Each day, 36,000 babies are born in China. If that number is doubled or trebled in the days around January 1st, the maternity wards will be hard put to cope.
Add to that the possibility of the Y2K bug hitting hospital electrical supplies or transport and chaos could ensue.
People are being encouraged now that it is much better to have a baby a bit later in the first year of the new century. January 1st falls within the Chinese Year of the Rabbit, which is not regarded as a particularly auspicious time, according to geomancers.
But the Year of the Dragon comes round for the first time in 12 years on February 5th, 2000. And, as everyone knows, the Year of the Dragon is the most auspicious time of all to be born; 2,000 couples will be married at a public ceremony in Beijing to usher in the new century and an expected wave of Dragon babies.
In the meantime, many visitors to the sex shop on Wangfujing Street are still hoping to hit the jackpot and are stocking up on the fertility aids, ignoring the shelf which carries condoms of "assorted colours, textures and flavours" at least until after April 9th.