Erotic and violent

很黄很暴力 (hěn huáng hěn bàolì): erotic and violent

“Erotic and violent!”

A phrase that a CCTV interviewee is believed to have been instructed to recite in support of the government's position towards controlling Internet content. In a December 2007 segment produced by CCTV’s flagship program News Simulcast (新闻联播 Xīnwén Liánbō) on the easy availability of “unhealthy and vulgar Internet content,” a young girl fretted, “The last time that I got on the Internet to search for information, a web page popped up suddenly. It was very erotic and very violent. I hurried and closed the page.” (Her appearance is available in Chinese on Youtube.)

Netizens wondered how a webpage could be both violent and erotic (sadomasochistic web pages are extremely rare in China) and how such a website could appear unless the girl was looking for such content (which would be unlikely given her age). People suspected that she had been fed her lines.

Her statement is similar to that of the “university student” Gao Ye, who claimed that his friend had become very disturbed from viewing pornographic content on the web. Gao was later outed as a CCTV intern.

“Erotic and violent” has stood the test of time: a search for the phrase on Weibo in February 2013 returned over two million results.