Pornography in China:Can It Be Stopped?

According to the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, Internet cops praised two websites that promptly filtered lewd content and criticized another that failed to follow commands in a timely manner. One site was in Beijing (xilu.com) and the other in Shanghai (blogbus.com). This was in response to the Chinese government’s month-long, pornography crackdown which commenced on January 5th and originally singled out high-profile search engines and portals that offered access to such content, with Google and Baidu.com topping the list. Google acknowledged the government order and said it would comply with government orders to block access to inappropriate content.

In Google’s own words coupled with the offer of both phone and e-mail contact information for users to report pornographic content to the company:

“Search engines link to massive amounts of content and our plan of action aims to overcome numerous technical challenges, balancing the need to reduce access to inappropriate information without hurting the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the search itself.”

The campaign followed the recent arrest of a woman who filmed herself having sex and then posted the video online. Shanghai police estimated that tens of thousands of users scoured Baidu.com, China’s most popular search engine, in search of this disgusting video. The government has extended the crackdown to include pornographic content displayed on mobile phones. To date, Chinese officials have closed 1,250 Web sites and arrested 41 people as part of the country's ongoing campaign against Internet pornography.

How effective this campaign against pornography will be remains a matter of time. As we all know, the cockroach has survived every civilization and climate known to man.

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