Chinese college students are developing increasingly open attitudes toward sex but do not have a strong awareness of safe sex, a survey released on Friday has suggested.

Some 48 percent of students polled in the survey accepted premarital sex, the survey said.

The study was conducted by the Guangdong provincial population and family planning commission and Guangdong provincial sexology association between Oct 9-15. The survey consulted 1,000 students at 10 universities in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province.

Only 34 percent of respondents said they used condoms. Nearly 30 percent of respondents said they did not think it was necessary to use condoms.

The survey was released in conjunction with the opening of the annual Guangzhou Sex Festival on Friday.

"Students are becoming more open to sex because they have more knowledge of sexual freedom," said Zhang Feng, director of the Guangdong provincial population and family planning commission.

A regulation allowing marriage between college students, which was implemented in 2005, also partly contributed to the open attitude toward sex among students, Zhang said.

Zhang said that they should improve their awareness of safe sex and noted that about 17 percent of respondents had suffered from sexual diseases.

Zhang attributed the lack of knowledge about safe sex to the way in which many students get their knowledge about sex - from pornography.

The survey said more than 40 percent of respondents said they had looked at porn websites or movies.

"My knowledge about sex would be totally empty if I had not watched porn movies," said a Guangzhou University student, who declined to be named.

In a separate recent survey conducted by the Beijing-based China Youth Daily, more than three quarters of 3,000 teenage respondents said the Internet was their most important source of information about sex.

Qiu Hongzhong, a professor of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, said inadequate sex education at school and home has helped force students to learn about sex from the Internet.

"There is a severe lack of formal sex education in the country. Most teachers, from primary schools to universities, do not have knowledge about sex. So how can they teach students?" Qiu told China Daily on Friday.

In the China Youth Daily's survey, school and parents ranked as the two least important sources for teenagers to learn about sex.