China's 3G market fuels porn wars

Chinese authorities are pushing for a clean up of the mobile porn that it says has a corrupting influence on its youth. Authorities blame the rise of 3G high-speed data services that have rolled out across the country for the upsurge in pornographic websites and say they will clamp down hard on those distributing such material.

China issued 3G (third generation) mobile network licenses to its three mobile carriers earlier this year, and the number of 3G users in China has slowly climbed. This year alone the country has also closed thousands of sites and arrested dozens in a campaign against online pornography. "Lawless people have begun using the full commercial deployment of 3G and its faster download speeds for pictures and videos... to spread obscene and pornographic content," Su Jinsheng, an engineer in China's IT ministry, said in a speech, according to a transcript on the ministry website. The cleanup was needed to "protect the healthy growth of the next generation and purify the social environment," he said.

Xinhua this week published an article in which it said it was important to rid the Internet of such material in order to promote a "healthy virtual world for Chinese minors". The article went on to say that "never has pornography posed such a great harm to the healthy growth of minors." According to Xinhua hundreds of "Internet portals transmitting pornographic information" had been closed since October. 

Such content was the cause of sexual crimes, Xinhua assets. "There are instances of minors committing such crimes as rape after viewing online pornography," the website said. Children's education was also being affected, it claimed. "Some minors just cannot concentrate on their studies after repeatedly viewing pornographic photos or videos online. That is why many parents worry that their children may be led astray by unhealthy content on the Internet."

While the arguments for and against pornography will rage for some time, there is an element of contradiction in the efforts to wipe out online pornography in China. Sex shops are common place across Beijing and in many big cities across the country. Sex toys, often displaying graphic imagery on the packaging, sit on shelves in full view of passers by. Brothels, though not as obvious, are also fairly common.

Meanwhile authorities continue their electronic war with online merchants, no doubt because they are not as easily taxed. Technically pornography is illegal in China and authorities have long cited it as a scourge on the country's culture. Earlier this year Google was caught up in a bitter dispute with Chinese authorities over pornographic search results that ultimately led to Google.com and other Google services being briefly blocked in the country. And recently a Chinese government watchdog ordered Yahoo China to clean pornographic content from a photo-sharing site it hosts. It's yet another reminder of the regulatory challenges faced by foreign Internet companies in China. The government-linked Internet Society of China on Friday said Yahoo China and other local websites had "violated social morals" by allowing porn to appear on their domains. 

tvnewswatch, Beijing, China