Tens of thousands of Chinese web surfers have been introduced to a new internet craze by the country’s notorious online sex diarist, a writer known as Muzimei.
As if running her intimate weblog describing her promiscuous encounters with more than 140 strangers were not enough, 27-year-old Li Li has now gone one step further.
In a challenge to authorities in the tightly controlled communist state, she has begun posting the sounds of her half-hour love-making sessions on her website.
More than 50,000 people downloaded one of her first attempts at such “podcasting” – a method of broadcasting sound over the internet that has recently taken off across China – to hear her bedroom encounter with a stranger, a soundtrack consisting of a mixture of polite chitchat and grunts and groans…
Thousands of Chinese internet users are using the same technology to make podcasts of their own. Some are music selections by would-be disc jockeys, but others are long streams of social commentary, which the country’s authorities are struggling to control.