“Yesterday they took my assistant to the police station. They (police) clearly told him this is an investigation, now, they are doing on me, on pornography,” Ai told AFP by telephone.

…

The accusations apparently centre on racy photographs posted on the Internet showing Ai with women, he said.

“When they detained me, they said ‘this is pornography’, but I just laughed, I said, ‘do you know what is pornography’?” he said. “Nudity is not pornography.”

The investigation revives accusations made against Ai when he was detained in April, according to the Associated Press, and continues an ongoing campaign to punish him for his criticism of China’s authoritarian government:

Ai questioned whether the police understood art and culture. “If they see nudity as pornography, then China is still in the Qing dynasty,” he said.

…

The photograph features the hefty, bearded artist and four women sitting on traditional Chinese wooden chairs on a concrete floor against a bare, white wall.

Zhao said police told him they might seek criminal penalties against him for the photograph if it had spread widely.

“They said, ‘This photograph is an obscene photograph.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that, what’s obscene about it?’ They said, ‘It’s just obscene.’ They’ve already decided that,” Zhao said. No charges have been pressed yet, he added.

Alison Klayman, director of the forthcoming documentary ‘Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry‘, posted the photos behind the charges on Facebook under the title “Nudity isn’t pornography”. (Both, however, are against the site’s terms and conditions, so Facebook logos were later added to the pictures at strategic locations.)

In light of the pornography probe, Reuters highlights an unlikely display of mass nudity as the latest form of online solidarity for Ai Weiwei:

By Monday afternoon, seventy people had posted nude photos of themselves on a website called “Ai Wei Fans’ Nudity — Listen, Chinese Government: Nudity is not Pornography” — a rare form of protest in a country where public nudity is still taboo.

They uploaded the photos after Beijing police questioned Ai’s videographer on Thursday for allegedly spreading pornography online by taking nude photographs of Ai and four women.

Supporters of Ai, whose 81-day secret detention earlier this year sparked an international outcry, say that the questioning over the nude photographs is China’s latest effort to intimidate its most famous social critic.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activists, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, dissidents, pornography
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According to an unnamed official from the State Internet Information Office, the microblogs were shut down for violations that include carrying pornographic images and videos, information for prostitution, as well as illegal advertising for sex-related drugs and productions.

Chinese law prohibits all forms of pornography, prostitution and sex-related contents in public media and Internet services.

Members of the public reported the microblogs, which were then investigated and closed by authorities, the official said.

…

The official said the spread of porn and vulgar material has been effectively contained since a crackdown on Internet- and cellphone-based pornography was launched in 2009.

Police detained three individuals last week for separate cases of online rumor-mongering and authorities have not hesitated to suspend users for spreading unfounded rumors on sites such as Sina Weibo. Today Sina’s rival, Tencent, said it was working on ways to police itself. From The Wall Street Journal:

Tencent Chairman Pony Ma didn’t specify what new methods Tencent is developing. But on the sidelines of a forum in Beijing on Monday, he said the pressure is more than political. “This isn’t just a government demand,” he said. “I think society also has this demand.”

“We feel perplexed” that false information can appear on Tencent Weibo, Mr. Ma said. “There should be oversight, but this oversight is beneficial in the long term, it’s helpful. Otherwise, I think this issue would be very chaotic.”

Chinese officials in recent months have stepped up their calls for Internet companies to better police their own services for “harmful information” and “rumors.” The terms are often bywords for information seen as sensitive by China’s leaders.

See also previous CDT coverage of the development and enforcement of China’s Internet regulations, including an August crackdown on 6,000 sites for manipulating and spreading information via illegal public relations deals.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-vulgarity campaign, Internet censorship, Internet crackdown, microblogs, pornography, sina weibo, tencent
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A man who allegedly kept six women as sex slaves in a dungeon for two years and killed two of them in a central China city has been sacked from his post and stripped of his Party membership.

Li Hao was fired from the inspection team under the Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision of Luoyang, Henan Province, after he was detained for forcing the women into prostitution and to feature in porno videos uploaded on the Internet to make money, Guangzhou Daily reported today.

Yu Hongwen, Li’s supervisor and head of the inspection team, was also suspended.

The reporter who unveiled the case has taken issue with the New York Times’ account of local authorities’ subsequent actions. From the Index on Censorship:

The journalist in question, Ji Xuguang, posted a message on Weibo saying that, contrary to online rumours, he had not been “arrested” (although his previous Weibo postings stated he had indeed been accused of revealing state secrets). Yet the term “arrested” was never used in the New York Times’ article: Jacobs stuck with “detained”.

In an email conversation, the article’s author, Andrew Jacobs, told me that the issue boils down to a “parsing of language.” … Jacobs added he believed Ji had been “detained” in the sense that “he was not allowed to waltz away from his questioners, which is why he asked his Weibo followers for help.” […]

“[Ji] said he was sorry if his “Weibo clarification” had caused us any trouble, but he had to tweet his clarification because the Henan authorities were using this “dispute” against him. He said he was hauled out of bed by his boss early one morning because Henan authorities accused him of getting the New York Times to exaggerate the story, so he had to come out and tell the truth, which is that he was not arrested.”

The New York Times was also accused in March of exaggerating the extent of telephone monitoring in China. The newspaper’s dramatic anecdote about a call being disconnected in response to an innocuous Shakespeare quote quickly took flight across the Internet and morphed into, for example, “Chinese censorware nukes any voicecall that contains the word ‘protest’“. Numerous attempts to reproduce the disconnection failed, however.

People’s Daily, meanwhile, reports that a Beijing lawyer was wrongly identified as Li Hao by a TV news report:

Shangdong Television used the picture of Wang Jin, of Beijing City Linkzone Law Firm, in a news program about the sex slave scandal last Friday, claiming the face was that of suspect Li Hao ….

Wang said: “I received numerous calls from friends and relatives asking me whether I had any relationship with the case and the suspect.”

He said his picture was available only on the law firm’s website alongside his name and an introduction, so using it wrongly was carelessness on the part of the TV station.

He said: “They must have picked the picture randomly from the Internet and used it because a picture of the suspect is unavailable.”

Luoyang police have apologised for failing to end the abducted women’s captivity sooner. From CNN:

Police didn’t act and raid Li’s home, until September 3 after one of the supposed “sex slaves” escaped and one of her relatives talked with police.

On Saturday, Guo Congbin — who directs the public security bureau in Luoyang, which is in Henan province — said the lag time between when Li began abducting the women and police discovered him indicates that community patrols were ineffective and police had lost their sense of responsibility.

He noted four police officers have been suspended; entertainment venues, Internet cafes, beauty parlors, saunas and the like are being more closely examined; and an “online cleansing” effort is targeting porn websites.

“I beg the people of Luoyang to give us another chance,” Guo said. “We will show you the results of our actions.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Henan, kidnapping, Luoyang, murder, new york times, police, pornography, prostitution, rape
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The just-completed Beijing to Shanghai high-speed rail link, which takes less than five hours for the 800-mile trip, is the crown jewel of China’s current 5,000 miles of rail, set to grow to 10,000 miles in 2020. Compare that to decaying Amtrak.

Gartner asks Herbold whether he has revised his view in the wake of the Wenzhou train crash.

“Not at all. The fact is, you’re going to run into bumps as you try to come out of what was the incredible doldrums that China was in in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s; that train wreck certainly was one. On the other hand, you’ve got to give the country credit for really pushing the frontiers of these areas, in terms of roads, in terms of trains, and the airports and the like. And they’re going to make mistakes, and they’re going to learn from them.

But the important thing is they’re doing things, and that’s what we’re not doing in the US, and that’s where the political system is letting America down. And it’s about time that the voters should be sick and tired of that, and I think they will be.”

Herbold sticks to his guns throughout, meeting the suggestion that corruption contributed to the Wenzhou crash with criticism of “pork” spending in the US. He describes China’s blocking of pornography online as “marvellous”, and argues that the US is also guilty of violating its citizens’ human rights by training them to be dependent on government handouts.

Sources:

Bob Herbold on his WSJ Op-Ed America Vs. China: Who is the Developing Country – China Policy Pod
China vs. America: Which Is the Developing Country? – WSJ.com

© samuel wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: corruption, development, governance, high-speed rail crash, Internet censorship, pornography
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Dear Journalists,

The National Office of Eliminating Pornography and Illegal Publications Working Committee will publicly destroy a large number of pirated and illegal publications on Friday, April 22, 2011. The main venue of the nationwide activity will be in Beijing. You are cordially invited to cover the event.

Time: 10am, April 22, 2011

Venue: Beijing Warehouse for Confiscated Goods (Beijing Shilong Yunda Storage Co. Ltd, Wangsiying County, Chaoyang District)

See attachment for the road map to the destruction site

Please send your application form to ipc@mfa.gov.cn before 5pm, April 20 and be at the site by 9:30am, April 22.

(via Bill Bishop)

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, foreign journalists, piracy, pornography
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The question is: why have they turned off the censorship, especially when (a) the Chinese government publicly censured Google for linking to porn sites last year and (b) the authorities are simultaneously cracking down on prostitution in Beijing, Shanghai and Dongguan?

No one knows why there has been a sudden change of heart. The friends who first told me the news speculated that with the recent spate of extreme violence carried out by middle-aged men (the kindergarten stabbings, today’s shoot-out in a court in Hunan), the government might be allowing pornography in order to vent some pent-up testosterone.

Perhaps also, with the closure of hundreds of brothels and saunas, the authorities have deemed the pornography a consolation.

Or perhaps there is a more pragmatic explanation. “It would not be a wild assumption to guess that this is a technical issue with the capacity of the Great Firewall [China's censorship system],” said Wen Yunchao, an activist in Guangdong.

See also “Porn (and More!) Unblocked, but Why?” from ChinaGeeks.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Great Firewall, Internet censorship, Online porn, pornography
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Chinese authorities destroyed 47.18 million pornographic and illegal publications on Sunday as part of an ongoing campaign to strengthen intellectual property rights (IPR) protection.

The campaign, organized by the national anti-pornography and anti-piracy office and carried out in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, marked an unprecedented number of publications destroyed in a single day.

More than 17 provinces eliminated more than 1 million pieces each, with Guangdong topping the list, destroying 12 million, or a quarter of the total.

China has attached great importance to IPR protection, which has been considered as a national strategy to help build an innovative country, said Liu Binjie, director of the National Copyright Administration.

© Zhaohua Li for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: IPR, pornography
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Web search engine Baidu.com was asked this week by Beijing’s Internet self-discipline organization to make a public apology for spreading pornographic photos of Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen.

The Beijing Internet news information review council, established by the government-sponsored Beijing association of online media, issued a statement on Monday, criticizing the Nasdaq-listed website as being badly behaved during the event.

The statement praised other mainland websites, including Sohu.com, Sina.com and Netease, as they urged Internet users “not to download, save or spread the photos” and “to prevent the photos from falling into the hands of children”.

© Michael Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Baidu, Edison Chen, pornography
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Chinese censors have banned producers of erotic movies and from competing for any film awards.

The ban, recently issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), also prohibits directors and leading actors from taking part in such any awards, the Beijing News reported on Monday.

“The heaviest punishment for such violation would lead to a five-year ban of perpetrators from the movie industry,” the newly-issued ordinance was quoted by the newspaper. [Full Text]

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: art censorship, movies, pornography, SARFT
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China blocked access to 18,401 illegal Websites during a nationwide campaign against online pornography that started in April, an industry newspaper reported today.

A total of 9,593 unregistered Websites were shut down while 8,808 Websites were closed for disseminating pornographic, illicit or fraudulent pictures and information on the Internet, said Miao Wei, deputy general manager of China Telecom, the country’s biggest telecommunication carrier, which was involved in the campaign. [Full Text]

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet censorship, Internet control, pornography, website registration
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