Many have been delighting in recent news that the Chinese authorities are offering rewards to netizens who report inappropriate sites. Given that China already has an estimated 30,000 cybercops patrolling the internet, it’s tempting to see this enlistment of volunteers as a sort of stimulus package, if you will. This campaign against “vulgar content”, as it’s often described, is but the newest in a long line of crackdowns on obscene material. The most recent battleground is the newly installed 3G mobile networks which offer high speed access to mobile users. Given the high percentage of internet users who don’t have their own computers – often using internet cafes to get online – and the rising number of mobile internet users in China, the WAP networks offer new possibilities for those seeking illicit material. On November 16th, a new drive was launched to “protect the healthy growth of the next generation and purify the social environment,” particularly on the mobile networks; the extensive filters and blocking technology employed on the regular internet is yet to be developed for mobile networks and so these communications are largely unpoliced.

Photo: helgasms!

Emerging technologies and pornographic content have always been linked. Chinese have been creating great erotic art and writing dating back to the Yuan Dynasty, a tradition which many scholars believed peaked during the late Ming Dynasty, when canonical, and racy, novels like The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Unofficial Story of the Embroidered Couch emerged. The spread of these texts coincided with the flourishing of the printing industry.

During the late Ming period, the spread of vulgar material was seen as a challenge to Confucian ideals. Fast forward to the Cultural Revolution and similar material was seen as a challenge to the nation – Western filth that threatened to pervert minds and topple the socialist state. China has also proven completely capable of producing homegrown vulgar content. An article published in the New York Times in 1990 by Nicholas Kristof quotes a People’s Daily front page editorial that spearheaded that year’s crackdown: “Hostile forces at home and abroad have never abandoned their hope of subverting the socialist system and overthrowing the Communist Party. They cannot succeed with guns and cannon, so they press a campaign of 'peaceful evolution' to infiltrate their culture and way of thinking.”

According to Kristof, that 1990 campaign led to the closing of “12 percent of China's newspapers, 13 percent of periodicals devoted to the social sciences and 7.6 percent of China's publishing houses.”

As technology advanced, so did the techniques of those out to stop pornography from entering and flourishing within China’s borders. In the 80s magazines were confiscated and burned. Schoolchildren enlisted in, but not quite understanding, the “Sweep the Yellow” campaign turned in books with yellow covers and even baby pictures of themselves in which they weren’t fully clothed. In 1996, thousands of compact discs were destroyed; in 1997, mounds of videos were crushed with construction equipment. Despite the scores of anti-porn campaigns in recent decades, according to TopTenREVIEWS, China, in 2006, was the country with the largest revenue from the porn industry (27.4 billion USD) – 28% of the global market – followed by South Korea, Japan and the US (14%). When it comes to producing pornography, the same report found that the US generated the most web pages; China didn’t rank in the top ten.

The fight against digital, online content is a trickier, less visible one and despite closings of tens of thousands of sites, relatively few people are prosecuted; punishment ranges from fines and surveillance to detention up to life imprisonment – instating the death penalty was considered but never done.

One of the reasons, it seems, for the low arrest rate is that China is choosing to go after the bigger service providers, stopping it at the root. The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre (CIIRC) – one of the seven agencies that currently lead the anti-pornography effort – reports that the biggest offenders in terms of providing mobile access to inappropriate content are the Google, Baidu, Sina, Sohu and New World WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) networks. Although technology to limit the distribution of pornographic content still lags far behind that for computer-based internet, it’s not a new concern for China’s cyberpolice: China’s Supreme Court set penalties for internet and phone pornography in 2004, around the time the CIIRC was founded.

Those of us living in China are painfully aware of the monitoring and selective blocking that is done to our internet access here. Most of China’s internet access enters the country through three general locations, which makes it easier to control. If the Chinese authorities chose to, they would have little trouble shutting down all unfettered internet access, including proxies, circumventors and the VPNs more of us are signing up for every day. All encrypted communications could be blocked. So why doesn’t it happen? Expats yearning to watch YouTube and post drunken pictures on Facebook are not the only people using VPNs – all manner of enterprise from retailers to banks rely on VPNs. Forcing credit card companies and financial organizations to send all their information over unencrypted networks would be disastrous and most experts believe it will never happen.

Instead, China is turning towards the next biggest juncture – the search engines: Google, Yahoo and Baidu have all run afoul of China’s net police and been forced to apologize and more carefully limit their search results. China is not the only country that holds search engines responsible for the content they provide access to, but do not produce themselves. The first time Google bowed to governmental requests to censor results was in Europe, in 2004, in order to comply with hate speech laws in Germany, France and Switzerland. Australia and Israel both have laws severely limiting access to certain kinds of online content and there have been attempts in America, the original supplier of most of China’s blocking technology, to enact similar legislation.

Those dealing with China’s mobile pornography problems must also contend with business and technology interests. China’s 3G network was a triumph for the country and telecom companies make significant amounts of money from WAP customers who download pornographic pictures and videos onto their mobile phones. Those concerned with China’s morals may face opposition from those concerned with the country’s technological development – a storm brewing since the 3G network plans were drawn up in the early draughts. Craig Watts, a telecoms analyst based in Beijing, foresaw this problem all the way back in 2003, “If porn turns out to be the main driver for 3G and the government completely shuts it out, it's going to hurt revenues for the carriers - who are state-owned and making money for the government,” he told TheFeature, "If operators have less revenue and users are less interested in applications then you fall a step behind the rest of the world.”

The market for pornography doesn’t look to be disappearing anytime soon, nor does the desire to get rich. Even in these troubled times, the market for vulgar content is a huge one. The 2007, TopTenREVIEWS report also calculated that every second, 28,258 internet users were viewing pornography and, in that same second, 3,075 USD was being spent on such material. Still, on some fronts China is relaxing its standards. The first art exhibition of nude photography in China attracted long lines and news attention in 2001, now nude photos are on display in galleries around the country. Fashions considered horribly risqué a few decades ago are the norm now. The sage Lord Chesterfield had this to say about pornography, “The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.” In this centuries old fight between pleasure, profit and puritanism, the winner – if only temporarily – will probably be the contingent with the fattest wallets.
 

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