Peter was red in the face from too many shots of baijiu and the alcohol pumped up his bravado perhaps a little more than he wanted. His sense of comic timing was far from impaired as solemnly declared: "I'm totally dedicated to my wife (beat) and my favorite 100 porn sites.
His declaration sent his friends into fits of laughter and also relieved what many experts say is a Chinese sexual revolution that's being led by do-it-yourself pornographers on the Internet.
Days after the party, Peter remained unembarrassed by his drunken admission, and despite the government's zero tolerance for sexually explicit Web content, said it is easy to find.
The 26-year-old says he keeps an "A disk" on his computer, where he stores a huge cache of downloaded porn.
"After a hard work day, I'll have a beer, watch some porn to relax and release the pressure," he said matter-of-factly.
Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the government has attempted to ban just about all forms of sexually explicit materials, calling them a violation of public morality.
Since the advent of the Internet, China has launched repeated crackdowns against online pornography, which is explicitly banned under China's Internet regulations.
Many words that express sex acts and eroticism are also blocked from search engines. Explicitly named pornographic websites are also blocked.
Despite the bans and crackdowns, huge numbers of people have found ways around China's "great firewall" to download porn or upload erotic, titillating homemade videos.
A survey conducted by Institute of Sexuality and Gender at Renmin University of China found that 52 percent of the 7,202 people surveyed between the ages of 18 and 61 say they have watched porn at least once in the last 12 months, up 12 percent since the institute's previous survey in 2000.
Of those surveyed between the ages of 14 and 17 almost half said they have watched porn. Young women who admitted to having watched porn accounted for 26.9 percent of all young people in the survey, while just 21.5 percent of young men who were surveyed admitted to having consumed sex-explicit material.
The survey also found that people with higher education and high salaries make up the majority of those who consume pornography. The survey suggests 56.8 percent of viewers of erotica have college degrees and 46 percent are white-collar workers.
"It's a misunderstanding that it is young criminals who watch porn and that it's porn that has turned them into criminals," Pan Suiming, the founder and director of Institute of Sexuality and Gender and also a professor at Renmin, told the Global Times.
Contrary to what government censors call the perils of "yellow poison," Pan says studies show that couples who watch porn together are more committed to each other.
Despite the government's banishment of sexually explicit Internet content, a research paper titled "A peep at Web pornography in China" shows that Internet porn is still widely available and often downloaded. Researchers at Xi'an Jiaotong University monitored network traffic in Northwest China from March 29, 2009 to January 25, 2010, and found 92,950 net porn pages were downloaded from 1,826 porn sites.
The research also found that most porn pages were downloaded to computers located in eastern coastal regions and more developed cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. It found that 93 percent of the porn sites were accessed from Web servers located abroad.
People's pornography
Katrien Jacobs, associate professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, examined the proliferation of sexually explicit images in China for her forthcoming book People's Pornography: Surveillance on the Chinese Internet.
She found that the government's ban of commercial porn sites has led to what she calls a thriving do-it-yourself community of pornographers who upload sex videos to peer-to-peer sites and bulletin boards.
"It's probably exciting for young adults to produce and upload them — it's exhilarating precisely because it is breaking the law and challenging conservative morality to government censorship," Jacobs told the Global Times.
Uploading and distributing sex videos is indeed risky in China. According to Chinese law, individuals convicted of producing, copying, publishing, selling or distributing pornography face 10 years to life in prison.
Still, Jacobs said China's Internet is swamped with DIY sex videos shot by young people in everyday locations such as classroom, bath houses, computer labs and city parks.
"I think it's important for Chinese youth to express these kinds of simple emotions and sexual identities, as it is also a way of reclaiming (China-made) pornography itself," said Jacobs, noting that most of China's "male-stream" pornography, is made in Japan.
Her scholarly work included dozens of interviews with consumers of pornography and examined the writings of numerous Chinese intellectuals and artists.
"Some of my interviewees make a clear distinction between sexual freedom and political freedom and believe that the former is futile and harmless, and hence more tolerated by the state," she writes.
Many consumers of commercial pornography are watching videos that often depicts women in a disturbing, sometimes violent manner and has little to do with erotic art.
Jacobs says she doesn't like the rough sex portrayed on Japanese porn sites but tolerates it. Many countries regulate sex on the Internet without banning it altogether, she said.
"In my opinion, the thieves of sex videos and the 'sneaky' uploaders are the ones who should be persecuted. Those who have consensual sex and can find designated websites to share materials should have the freedom to do so."
China's attempts to censor cyber porn seem to center on preventing perceived immoral pursuits by the populous and protecting women from degrading, unreal depictions of their desire.
Many scholars and Internet activists say cyber censors have cast such a large net it also envelopes artistic expression of eroticism and freedom of expression.
"Define freedom. I think only people who are addicted to porn would agree" it should be legalized, said Yang Shui, manager of the anti-pornography website haongo.com. "Nobody has right to give other people pain and trash."
Yang said the website, which was launched by a group of women volunteers last October, has reported over 300 porn websites to the China Internet Information Center.
Yang said his site was been repeatedly attacked by hackers. "That shows how important our work is. We're going to fight them," said Yang, without defining what constitutes his group's definition of pornography or explaining how his volunteer porn busters were able to protect themselves from itsbad influences.
Yang has little appreciation of China's emerging DIY porn culture, and believes it has no redeeming virtues. "These young people are really stupid. They have no idea what they are doing. As one of my friends said, 'if you can't show your videos to your children and parents, then they (the videos) belong in the garbage.'"
Campaign against 'yellow poison'
China's latest anti-pornography campaign shut down more than 60,000 websites last year, leading police to investigate almost 2,200 related criminal cases, the Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the Information Office of the State Council.
Some of the websites labeled pornographic during the crackdown have reportedly been unblocked, leading activists to suggest the government uses its campaign against porn to block sites that have little to do with sex.
A causal browsing of websites hosted by mainstream search engines such as toudou.com reveal many titillating pictures of near naked women in suggestive poses. The links they advertise are usually blocked but there are many open sites offering bizarre sex toys for sale.
Jacobs writes that her team of researchers connected to the Internet from a Starbucks in Shenzhen, and were able to access sex-explicit sites within five minutes of going online.
While the dam holding back sex content on Chinese websites may be leaky, the public condemnation of the harm it does is ubiquitous.
A university student from Shanxi Province was awarded 10,000 yuan ($1,465) for reporting 32 pornographic websites to authorities in January.
He blamed the porn website for "poisoning his pure heart" and causing him to fail school. "I was always in the best class of the best school. My goal was to enter a really good university. After I became addicted to watching porn, I was only able to get into a junior college," said the student who was quoted by the Shanxi Evening News.
"Watching porn messes up your mind…I want to help other students who have been poisoned by porn," he said without explaining if he ever sought addiction counseling.
China has made examples of local pornographers who dare to operate in its sex-forbidden Web zone and have shown it'll pursue the most extreme offenders.
Chen Hui was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 for opening the country's most popular pornography website Pornographic Summer. Before it was closed it attracted more than 600,000 subscribers with over 9 million pornographic pictures and articles. It had received more than 11 million hits, according to Xinhua.
In August Xinhua also reported a joint China-US police operation has cracked down a chain of membership-based, Chinese-language child pornographic websites.
The China-born website operator 26-year-old Wang Yong was arrested in New York in June.
For happy, porn consumer Peter it's all about a matter of choice. He says one person's trash is another's treasure and suggests those who think his treasure is garbage should just click on another website.