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China tries, with limited success, to halt online porn
By Jason Subler
September 27, 2004
Beijing - Authorities have given China's Internet and telecommunications
operators, regulators and police a deadline: Clear the country of online smut
before Oct. 1, the National Day holiday marking the birth of the People's
Republic.
The task force created to carry out this "people's war against electronic
pornography," involving at least five ministries and government departments,
has responded to the decree with zeal -- but so far, with limited success.
The crackdown began in earnest in mid-June with the opening of a Web site at
which citizens can report offending porn sites. Since then, authorities have
shut down about 700 of the country's estimated 1,000 pornographic Web sites and
arrested more than 300 people.
Those found guilty can be punished with life imprisonment under new regulations
if they are found to be operating sites that have received more than 250,000
visitors.
But experts say even such stern measures are failing to root out a hugely
profitable product in a vast land with rapidly developing computer and
communications technology.
However firm the government's resolve, it has limited means for dealing with
pornography, said Will Zhang, research and publications director at the U.S.
Information Technology Office here.
"The government can arrest people, block Web sites and censor Web searches, but
it doesn't have advanced enough technical methods to effectively censor online
porn," he said.
That has meant that the country's Internet and telecom operators have been
pushed onto the front lines of this war on vice. "The operators have a better
technical capacity for tracking down porn, so the government is pushing them to
do their own internal policing," Zhang said.
Until recently, telecom companies such as China Mobile and China Telecom, as
well as major Web portals such as Nasdaq-listed Sohu.com and Sina Corp., were
effectively accomplices to the porn industry. They reaped windfalls in fees for
hosting many of the Web sites, phone-sex services, text messaging and handset
game providers the government now seeks to shut down.
With credit cards still not widespread in China, one of the most common ways of
collecting fees for Internet content has been through mobile phone text
messages. Users wishing to enter a paid porn site would enter their mobile
phone number on the site. A password would be sent to the mobile phone, and the
subscription fee would be charged directly to the phone bill.
Both the mobile operators and the portals took a cut -- until last spring, when
the government barred them from collecting fees for porn providers. While
earlier government appeals had been ignored, "the telecoms and portals are
being quite cooperative now, since there are clear penalties for not
cooperating," Zhang said.
At the same time, the country's banking regulator has required banks to
scrutinize their online transaction services for traces of filth, and to freeze
the accounts of any clients found to be involved in pornography.
But the porn industry is far from crippled.
"I think it's a gesture, but it's limited in effectiveness," said Duncan Clark,
managing director of Beijing-based telecom consultancy BDA. The government "can
always put pressure on the larger companies to cooperate -- they're also
interested in protecting their brands. But there are always the smaller
fly-by-night operations that will pop up," he said.
And they have popped up in the unlikeliest places. The Interfax news agency
reported that a pornographic site was shut down this summer on the server of
the local government of the city of Huanggang, Hubei Province. Officials say a
government employee illegally rented the space to the site's creator.
Providers have also employed linguistic creativity, flipping the order of the
characters for the Chinese word for porn, "seqing," to create the code word
"qingse." On a popular search engine, "seqing" yields hundreds of news items
about the government's crackdown, while "qingse" leads to hundreds of porn
sites.
Many such sites -- a large number of which are based in Taiwan and Hong Kong --
are blocked in the mainland, but there is still a sea of Chinese-language and
foreign sites available. And savvy Web surfers also use proxy servers and
special software to reach sites they want to view.
At the same time, porn providers have developed new ways of billing to
circumvent the restrictions on banks and phone services.
"Many Web sites are now reverting to more low-tech payment methods, like simple
bank transfers and wiring money through the postal service," Zhang said. "They
use individual accounts, so it's hard to tell what the transactions are for.
And if one account gets closed down, another soon takes its place."
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