Porn Sites Still Exposed In China 132
crimeandpunishment writes "Could it be that internet censorship in China has a pecking order? Politics and human rights are bad — but porn is okay? The porn sites that suddenly popped up in China two months ago are still accessible, leaving people wondering if it's a change in policy, a glitch, or maybe a test by the Chinese Internet police. The Chinese government isn't saying, but one Internet analyst speculates, 'Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won't pay so much attention to political matters.'"
The Romans did it (Score:5, Interesting)
Or more ominously (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep your sites from the filter for a day=proffit (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think about it, China is a very big market for porn. Considering there is no competition what so ever and the shear size of the population, it must be extremely proffitable for those who can get in there even if for a few weeks, days or even hours. So if an owner of a handfull of porn sites is able to keep from being filtered, perhaps by a sizable under the counter bribe, then they still stand to make a lot of money. Either way it shows that whoever is in charge of looking after the filter is either corrupt or incompitent and thus a very good argument to why the whole idea is very bad in the first place.
The government (Score:5, Interesting)
You have to realize that in China, the government is like the weather. It just sort of happens and nobody can do anything about it. Everyone's getting along fine, and the all the sudden one day, boom, a new policy is published and everything is turned upside down. There's no public discussions, no hints on what's in the pipeline, just the final policy. In my city, one day, boom, they banned motorcycles. The announcement was made through the pro-government media, and you had 30 days to figure out how to manage life without your crotch rocket. They changed a law that greatly affected truck taxi drivers, and there were actual protests, a thing that happens a lot more than you'd think in China. (protesting against the government is seen as a right-wing act and has been banned since the founding of the People's Republic).
Everything to do with the GFW is strange, too, because it's secret. They don't even bother to announce policies. Probably some faction of the Information Ministry (it used to be much cooler when it was called the Propaganda Ministry) won a power struggle against some other faction. If porn is unblocked, yay, better for me. I hate VPNs, I have never had a reliable experience with one that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. VPNs also have terrible connectivity to sites inside China, which is where I spend a lot of my working time. Besides, it's just cooler to browse the web with a .cn IP address.
Oldest pacification strategy: Bread & Circuses (Score:5, Interesting)
The Communist Party has been doing well with the bread angle (at least compared to the 1970s), and now they're just fine-tuning the circuses.
Re:Keep your sites from the filter for a day=proff (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think about it, China is a very big market for porn. Considering there is no competition what so ever and the shear size of the population, it must be extremely proffitable for those who can get in there even if for a few weeks, days or even hours. So if an owner of a handfull of porn sites is able to keep from being filtered, perhaps by a sizable under the counter bribe, then they still stand to make a lot of money. Either way it shows that whoever is in charge of looking after the filter is either corrupt or incompitent and thus a very good argument to why the whole idea is very bad in the first place.
Don't forget gender imbalance either. Due to families preferring boys (and widespread abortion when it turns out it's going to be a girl) now China has a 120:100 male to female ratio. So yes, China is a huge market for porn indeed...
Nineteen Eighty-Four (Score:5, Interesting)
In Orwell's novel, the "prole" masses, which make up 85% of the population, do have access to porn.
Quote:
"The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted."
Letting the people of no consequence do what they want in these regards helps to keep them down.
"It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations."
Re:Oldest pacification strategy: Bread & Circu (Score:5, Interesting)
People need bread and want circuses. Given enough of both, not much else is required.
Revolutions happen when "bread" gets too expensive. If there is insufficient bread available, and it's the fault of the ruling class, there is no logical reason not to slaughter them and take their bread. The last time this happened in China was very recently, in 1948.
Smart rulers understand this.
Not sure. Maybe. Maybe not. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. For a start I'm not sure if government regulation in China is as much bowing to the general culture, as just basically trying to shape it into something that's not threatening the status quo.
Traditionalism and "we're holier than the West" has been the battlecry of just about every tin-horn dictator or clique/junta. E.g., you only have to look at Eastern Europe to see a bunch of countries who were on one hand chest-thumpingly secular, yet played the sanctity of the family card worse than the stereotypical bible-thumping fundies. The general idea when you want to keep a bunch of people in line, seems to be along the lines of (A) don't change what works, as long as "works" means us being at the top, (A1) new ideas are bad, (B) the West is actually a place of oppression and scary depravity and generally all the evils imaginable, and only a degenerate would take ideas from them. Because ultimately appeal to tradition and xenophobia is all anyone has to support why nobody should even think of newfangled stuff like multi-party elections or uncensored press.
(Well, other than "and we'll shoot you if you disagree", but that tends to make people unhappy if it's the official doctrine as opposed to just the subtext.)
So basically all I'm saying is that China really doesn't have much choice but to at least pretend it's against it. Because it has to be against just about everything the West does differently. It can't go and admit, "you know, America had a lot of good ideas. What a country!" because then it gives more people the idea "so why don't we try to be more like them?" And by now that wouldn't be just bad for the party at the top, but for the whole pyramid of corrupt kleptocrats bribing them too. I bet just the idea for example that those workers demanding rights instead of sticking to the Chinese way, is probably making a few sphincters clench so hard they turn shit into diamonds.
2. That something continues to exist in a corrupt system, well, I wouldn't necessarily take it as official acknowledgement that it's ok. The modus operandi in just about any corrupt system is that you can get away with just about anything if you bribe the right people or are related to them, and it doesn't directly piss off someone higher than them. (So political opposition is still basically out.) Occasionally they'll need to make a spectacular example of someone, but half the time it'll be of those who didn't bribe enough, and the other half it's just the cost of doing business.
So basically what the Chinese government may be really thinking about those sites might actually be more along the lines of "oh, that one is operated by comrade Chang's son-in-law, the other one is by Wang's best buddy, and that other one is paying the bribes fair and square." Occasionally some big speech will be made condemning them, a few of the small fish who thought it's ok for them too will be make a public example of, and life will continue. And occasionally Chang or Wang will fall from grace for other reasons and their protege will be made an example of too, just as a mean of extra revenge, or so Wang's or Chang's successor will seem all intransigent and tough on crime (which will almost invariably mean: to make some room for his own proteges.) And again life will continue like before.
Re:Keep your sites from the filter for a day=proff (Score:4, Interesting)
There is lot of money in the porn. Fact. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Keep your sites from the filter for a day=proff (Score:2, Interesting)