Internet smut makes for market we can't glut

• Source: Global Times
• [21:36 December 17 2009]
• Comments

By Robert Foyle Hunwick

Last week, I tried to access the popular website We Live in Beijing. Alas, I was instead met with a message saying that access had been suspended due to a server shutdown in Dalian, Liaoning Province, part of the latest effort to "purify social environment and protect minors' mental health."

It's fair that China, along with Western countries, wants to protect minors from unrestricted Internet viewing. It's also true that the move is a response to parents' complaints that the government should protect children from viewing unsuitable material.

But the current campaign has merely driven up Internet traffic: The Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center received 500 phone calls and 13,000 e-mails in one day after it announced rewards for porn stool pigeons.

Thousands of Chinese are cruising for porn in order to then report it. But then hypocrisy and sexual repression have always gone hand in hand.

Those nostalgic days of a youngster's initiation into manhood being when he came across a damp copy of Gentleman's Hour magazine are gone. Now it's more likely to be a schoolgirl's innocently clicking on her button that leads to a wormhole of scatological filth.

Yet taking down whole servers and arresting pornographers means that everyone has to needlessly suffer. I wonder at the pointlessness.