On Jan. 5, 2009, a year before Google and Hillary Clinton publicly challenged Chinese Internet controls, China’s central government launched a sweeping Internet crackdown. Over the next 12 months authorities shut down thousands of Web sites and arrested 5,400 people, almost entirely without drawing complaints from human rights protesters. Authorities even recruited college students and mothers to help in the roundup.
The officials managed that trick by picking a soft target: online pornography. Security and propaganda authorities have long used porn as a pretext for strengthening hard-line factions in the government and tightening controls over Web content. It’s no surprise that it is the excuse for going after Google ( GOOG – news – people ) and the liberated–or libertine, depending on your point of view–U.S. Internet.
There’s an irony that makes this strategy work: China imports most of its porn, and one of the biggest exporters is the U.S. Although pornography (“yellow” material, in Chinese shorthand) is easy to find with your fingertips in China, both on the computer and on your mobile phone, the government never fails to point out that the stuff comes from overseas (read: American) Web servers. Just a few days after Clinton gave her Internet freedom speech, the Chinese-language edition of Global Times pointedly noted: “Among the pornographic Internet cases in 2009 uncovered by China’s public security authorities, 93.2% of the Web sites were established overseas.” The article accuses the U.S. of being a haven for Web porn in the same way that some island nations are tax havens. “It is … terrifying that, though the servers for these sites are located in the U.S., they leave the bad fruits in other countries.”
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