Porn is porn in China when you make money

China's latest anti-porn campaign has stretched out to the educational BBS's, the only internet battle it cannot win, says Business Week. Defining what porn exactly is has always been tough, but the educational authorities seems to draw the line when money gets involved. Non commercial sex and communication between individuals does not seem to be at stake.
Business Week quotes an expert from an article in the China Daily:

According to Zhang, the Internet has 370 million sexually explicit websites, and Chinese can get to lots of them, despite the best efforts of the government. Says the China Daily: “Zhang, who has studied sex education for 16 years, said Web sites should cater to the needs of juveniles and improve their environment because 'it is impossible to block all the unhealthy information on the Internet.'"

The crackdown seems to be a rather symbolic one.

Naked on cam no porn

Shanghaiist has always a keen eye for issues concerning free speech, so we followed their lead to a wise decision by a Beijing district prosecutor to drop charges against a 36-year old woman. She had undressed in one of the nude chat rooms.
According to the court those virtual gathering places were not defined in China's pornography laws. The case even did not make it to the court, as the prosecutor already thought he had no case.

Baidu Japan blocked

The new Japanese service of China's largest search engine Baidu, got blocked, discovered Yee today. We already started the count-down at the end of March as we discovered large amounts of soft porn on this new service. You can get to the porn from China when you use a proxy like here, a test we did only for scientific reasons.

China global leader in porn revenue?

China Lee comes from Arizona

Figures and China are a difficult combination, I have argued more than once. But this is an interesting one. According to this research China is leading in porn, followed by South-Korea, Japan and only then the US.

The total revenue stream for China is US$27.4 billion and that results in a per capita expenditure of about US$ 27. Why is that number not true? First, the porn industry is illegal, so whatever there might be in revenue will be very hard to verify.

Second, that illegal porn is free or very cheap. If you are in China, just look out of the window: do you see somebody passing by who would spend 300 Renminbi on porn? Seems very unlikely.

As a former historian I checked of course the footnotes, but the researcher only says they come from reliable sources. Yes, of course. Like his research.