Slashdot Mirror
Porn Sites Pop Up In China
crimeandpunishment writes "It may only be a temporary glitch, but it's one that's providing some pleasure for Internet users in China. Previously blocked websites, including ones with pornography, are suddenly accessible in China. The country has a long history of cracking down on online pornography. One analyst says it's far more likely that this is a glitch, not a change in Internet censorship policy."
You fail, again.
It's a trap designed to let the government perform a high-profile sweep of "perverts".
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I have a porn site that gets shitloads of traffic from China. Several other porn web masters I know also gets Chinese traffic, so their porn block filter most definitely is not air tight. There is just way to much porn on the internet for a single filter to block it all.
that will be popping up. ;)
I was there two years ago. Spent time in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as Shenzhen and Shanghai (the last two being unequivocally mainland China). No problems at all accessing pr0n, I can tell you. But is that because I was at various ritzy hotels where the censorship rules don't apply equally?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
It may only be a temporary glitch, but it's one that's providing some pleasure for internet users in China.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a perverted sentence?
I usually don't get that upset about split infinitives.
Yeah, I noticed this recently. I popped in the name of my favorite porn sample aggregator and it loaded, as did all the sites it linked to. Later, I tried to go to youtube - blocked! It turns out my VPN was off the whole time and I hadn't noticed. These porno sites were all blocked before. I don't believe it's de jure illegal to access porn sites, but it is illegal to host them for sure. Online porn is one of the things that the Chinese mafia does in its IT divisions.
What China needs is to produce its own domestic porn. There is no shortage of women ready and willing to do whatever is required. They have Taiwanese and HK porn but it sucks (ask for "yellow DVD/huang1 de DVD" at your friendly neighborhood DVD shop). To many mainland Chinese, the only context they see white women in is pornos or mainstream media. This distorts their viewpoint of all white women. A couple of my friends get harassed all the time because they have blonde hair and nice chests. Everyone assumes they're prostitutes because they look like the women that the Chinese see in pornos. Come on, how many of you immediately think of "kung fu" (or worse, "karate") when you see a Chinese person? Associations are there and they are real.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Growing up Christian, I understood well why a *Christian* nation would want to eliminate pornography. Banning pornography seemed to fit well with the sixth commandment. It didn't seem at all out of the ordinary that law reflected the derision of most of the voters.
But why is China blocking porn? They aren't a traditionally Christian country - they're decidedly atheist, and actively prosecute Christians. They haven't a clue why (philosophically, at least) sexual morality matters. It seems remarkably odd that a country decidedly anti-Christian is enforcing a ban on pornography, and one more restrictive than America (which is supposedly a Christian nation (or was)).
What possible reason could they have for doing this, aside from the outright malevolent oppression of their citizens. They don't even know *why* porn is wrong, yet they outlaw it.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
- Orwell, 1984.
But that's just the root cause of all totalitarian ideologies. You're looking for the proximate cause, which is why this specific form of control is useful.
Fortunately, the fictional society in George Orwell's unintentional HOWTO also featured a "Junior Anti-Sex League", and it's there for the same reason that China features a ban on pr0n.
Totalitarians have known precisely what's wrong with unregulated sex, and they've known it - even if just instinctively - since before the written word.
"It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. ( ... ) There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity with the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account."
- Orwell, 1984.
Of course, it's not just the Chinese totalitarians who do this sort of thing. The United States is full of Republichristian fundamentalists to the point that the gay evangelist and toe-tapping Senator are practically cliches.
The Catholic priesthood is celibate - and when it says "Think of the children!", methinks it doth protest too much. But even without its legions of pedopriests, the Catholic Church's ban on contraception comes from the same place: control mating opportunities amongst the laity, and you can keep 'em in church -- because without sex, your gigantic cathedrals (which feature some of the most beautiful architecture/lighting/windows/artwork ever created, and giant mindblowing-reverberating pipe organs that still sound awesome centuries after their construction) were the closest thing a Dark Ages serf would ever get to experiencing ecstasy.
Meanwhile, the marital history of the guy who founded that other religion from the Middle East speaks for itself, and the resulting social policies, in which tribal leaders and rich dudes get four wives... well, with all the wives taken 4-at-a-time to the upper crust, that leaves the low-ranking tribesmen with nothing to look forward to but to strap bombs on themselves in order to hurry up and get their mojo on with those 72 virgins waitin' for 'em in the afterlife.
China's ban on pr0n is just a symptom of a much wider phenomenon that's practically universal amongst authoritarians. The goal isn't th ban pr0n, but the reason it is there is a very good one: it works.