Internet pornography filtrates Chinese ban
- Source: Global Times
- [08:54 June 04 2010]
- Comments
By Jonathan DeHart and Shen Weihuang
As theories hatch on the suddenly free access to some pornographic websites in China, industry experts in Shanghai believe that access to the illicit sites is likely the result of a technical glitch.
A wave of chatter has shot across the blogosphere and among local information technology experts about the apparent relaxing of the strict Chinese ban that provides Internet users with the online freedom of delving into sexual fantasies.
Many Western-based porn sites have been available in China for at least the past 10 days while social networking website Facebook and video sharing website YouTube remain in lock down.
Most foreign bloggers speculate that the newfound accessibility is owed to either a slip-up by the government, or an intentional move by the government to provide a release valve for frustrated men in light of the latest attacks at schools and the Foxconn suicides.
Even the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai is not being ruled out as a cause, industry insiders say.
"The Beijing Olympics saw the government relax Internet monitoring in the same way that the World Expo may be doing so," Ning Chen, an information technology engineer at Cisco Systems in Shanghai, told the Global Times Thursday.
Ning, however, likened this explanation to a stretch, admitting that the real cause was likely a product of less progressive means.
"Websites are normally filtered in one of two ways, either by key words or by IP addresses," he said.
"The government either dropped the ban, or the system was hacked," he said. "Since access to porn sites in China is pretty much unheard of, I believe the hacker situation is the more realistic explanation."
Other industry experts are also supporting this line of thought, including Wu Jun, vice president of Shanghai Runxing Network Technology Company, an information technology firm.
"These pornographic websites may have moved to a new server, or established new IP addresses to get around the Chinese filter system," he said.
But Lu Feng, a spokesman for the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, did not acknowledge that such a case had occurred, when reached by the Global Times Thursday.
Though he declined to comment on the situation, he said that the municipal police bureau does not typically block websites unless someone reports that illegal ones are being run in China.
Meanwhile, locally based Western journalists, including the UK Telegraph's Shanghai correspondent Malcolm Moore, are writing about the phenomenon, puzzled by the domains that are available to users in a country that strongly denounces such prurient expression.
Like Moore, many bloggers are confused, particularly after the government condemned Google last year for their porn-friendly search capabilities, and amid crackdowns on prostitution in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong.
Further clouding the picture are the recent arrests of Ma Yaohai, an associate professor in Nanjing, who was arrang-ing group sex parties, and of five men in Chongqing, who were running one of the China's largest pornographic chat rooms via webcam, the bloggers say.
All the while, Shanghai residents are divided on what access to pornographic websites in the country means for China. Some like Zhang Wenjun, a local civil servant, are shaking their heads.
"There are too many young people viewing these dirty websites," he said. "Young people also have less self-control, so we need better Internet censorship to help keep them in line."
Others like Christine Boado, who works for the Shanghai branch of an international sex toy company, disagreed, arguing that more sexual education is needed in the country.
"This could be a sign that attitudes about sexually are gradually changing in Chinese society," she said Thursday. "Unblocking Internet porn sites could also mean that the Chinese government is ready to focus on bigger problems."
Duan Wuning and Tyler Roney contributed to this story
