Porn crackdown targets online fiction

Coinciding with a Wired magazine article hailing China’s burgeoning market for online novels, China announced a crackdown on obscene online fiction. The dragnet has already snared 348 websites, accused of publishing “disgusting” written content that could “easily poison the minds of young people.”

This anti-vice operation seems a strange use of China’s resources. Written pornography isn’t as scintillating as pornographic photographs or movies, which are widely available online and off. And even if this crackdown is part of China’s general push to “clean up” before the Olympics, online written pornography isn’t in the same category of behaviors that will be obvious to foreign visitors, like spitting, queue-jumping, or wandering around the hutong without a shirt on.

This crackdown also seems to undermine China’s policy of fostering a “prosperous” Internet culture. In speeches to the Central Party Conference in January and April this year, Hu Jintao emphasized the importance of promoting a prosperous Internet market and culture.

But expunging pornography from the Internet doesn’t make for a prosperous Internet. As Chinese blogger Lao Bai has noted, behind every successful website in China is a naked woman. (He’s not alone: Broadway’s Tony award-winning musical Avenue Q features a song called “The Internet is for porn.”)

Perhaps most poignantly, the day Xinhua ran its announcement of the crackdown, Northeast Network published an article arguing that information about sexual techniques in the classic erotic texts of ancient China was both more abundant and more profound than anything available in the West. The article recounts that when Westerners began traveling the Silk Road and gained exposure to Eastern sexual culture, they were “dumbfounded.”

Your correspondent whole-heartedly agrees that sexual explicitness in China’s classical written texts signals the advanced nature of ancient Chinese culture. If China manages to purge its modern cultural texts of sexually-explicit writing, what will future generations think?