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Tuesday 16 February 2010
Innocent websites suffer in Beijing’s anti-porn push
More than 130,000 websites have been closed in the mainland’s crackdown on internet pornography, although less than 12 per cent of them were actually pornographic.
Innocent websites suffer in Beijing’s anti-porn push
Stephen Chen 12 February 2010
More than 130,000 websites have been closed in the mainland’s crackdown on internet pornography, although less than 12 per cent of them were actually pornographic.
The figures, buried in a Xinhua report meant to hail the success of the anti-porn campaign, prove a long-held suspicion that the central government is using pornography as a pretext to suppress Web freedom.
Since December, the Communist Party’s Central Committee has ordered the country’s state-owned internet service providers, such as China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, to examine every website on their servers, an anonymous senior party official in charge of cyberspace told Xinhua.
The official said the telecommunications operators sniffed through more than 1.8 million websites. By Wednesday, more than 136,000 had been shut down.
Among them, “16,000 contained pornographic or sexually explicit contents, and among these, 11,000 were accessible by mobile phones”, the official was quoted as saying.
Porn-free websites were shut down because they were not “officially registered”.
Mainland internet regulations require websites to apply for a government certificate before opening to the public. The process is time-consuming and often abused by corrupt government officials. For years, many small websites, especially non-commercial ones built and maintained by individuals, have skipped the registration process.
At about the same time that the anti-pornography campaign was launched, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced an amendment to the registration regulation. An individual citizen who did not have a business licence or government approval was no longer eligible to register.
More than 100,000 websites were shut down “overnight”, according to Xue Maoxin, a commentator on the mainland’s information technology industry.
Xue wrote in his blog that the government’s “bulldozer” methods had angered many website owners. “The application process involves tedious and sophisticated paperwork. To someone without a comprehensive education on internet law, it is an unsurpassable barricade. The registration can take more than 60 days, and you are not guaranteed a licence. A large number of websites applied but could not get it,” he wrote.
“If the current campaign is aimed at those few that have pornographic contents, isn’t it too hasty to shut down another 100,000 innocent websites overnight?”
Mainland authorities have been using widespread fear of online pornography as a moral defence, and many parents do worry about the effects such websites can have on their children.
But research by Chengdu Polytechnic University shows that the shame and fear associated with online pornography could be a result of government sex education, which describes sex before marriage as guilty and shameful.
Psychiatrists Dr Wang Pei and Dr Zeng Fan interviewed 2,000 students on the campus last year. They found that students who had received formal sex education voiced stronger “resentment” against internet porn and felt guiltier when watching it.
However, they were also more addicted to internet porn. The contradiction prompted the researchers to question the quality of sex education on the mainland.
The mainland’s high school sex education course is called “biological sanitation”, and most of its content deals with how to avoid pregnancy and the disastrous consequences of premarital sex.
1 comment:
Innocent websites suffer in Beijing’s anti-porn push
Stephen Chen
12 February 2010
More than 130,000 websites have been closed in the mainland’s crackdown on internet pornography, although less than 12 per cent of them were actually pornographic.
The figures, buried in a Xinhua report meant to hail the success of the anti-porn campaign, prove a long-held suspicion that the central government is using pornography as a pretext to suppress Web freedom.
Since December, the Communist Party’s Central Committee has ordered the country’s state-owned internet service providers, such as China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, to examine every website on their servers, an anonymous senior party official in charge of cyberspace told Xinhua.
The official said the telecommunications operators sniffed through more than 1.8 million websites. By Wednesday, more than 136,000 had been shut down.
Among them, “16,000 contained pornographic or sexually explicit contents, and among these, 11,000 were accessible by mobile phones”, the official was quoted as saying.
Porn-free websites were shut down because they were not “officially registered”.
Mainland internet regulations require websites to apply for a government certificate before opening to the public. The process is time-consuming and often abused by corrupt government officials. For years, many small websites, especially non-commercial ones built and maintained by individuals, have skipped the registration process.
At about the same time that the anti-pornography campaign was launched, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced an amendment to the registration regulation. An individual citizen who did not have a business licence or government approval was no longer eligible to register.
More than 100,000 websites were shut down “overnight”, according to Xue Maoxin, a commentator on the mainland’s information technology industry.
Xue wrote in his blog that the government’s “bulldozer” methods had angered many website owners. “The application process involves tedious and sophisticated paperwork. To someone without a comprehensive education on internet law, it is an unsurpassable barricade. The registration can take more than 60 days, and you are not guaranteed a licence. A large number of websites applied but could not get it,” he wrote.
“If the current campaign is aimed at those few that have pornographic contents, isn’t it too hasty to shut down another 100,000 innocent websites overnight?”
Mainland authorities have been using widespread fear of online pornography as a moral defence, and many parents do worry about the effects such websites can have on their children.
But research by Chengdu Polytechnic University shows that the shame and fear associated with online pornography could be a result of government sex education, which describes sex before marriage as guilty and shameful.
Psychiatrists Dr Wang Pei and Dr Zeng Fan interviewed 2,000 students on the campus last year. They found that students who had received formal sex education voiced stronger “resentment” against internet porn and felt guiltier when watching it.
However, they were also more addicted to internet porn. The contradiction prompted the researchers to question the quality of sex education on the mainland.
The mainland’s high school sex education course is called “biological sanitation”, and most of its content deals with how to avoid pregnancy and the disastrous consequences of premarital sex.
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