Wet and Post-Revolutionary Panties on China’s Deck of Observation

by Katrien Jacobs

“China is more open” is the response most often heard when I try to interview people in Hong Kong about their online sex affairs and dealings with pornography. I have been interviewing people for half a year now, and they are nervous and terse, perhaps even humiliated by the news about Mainland China’s swanky blogosphere. Hong Kong seems to have accepted its mediocre performance in the pop charts of quantitative sex. Hong Kong is obviously in turmoil over democracy movements and sites of political activism, but DIY porn in the “mono-colour ghost city” (in the words of indie media and porn activist Oiwan Lam) seems to suffer in a thrift towards supersonic capitalism or cranky provincialism. After a solitary act of civil disobedience to protest obscenity laws, Lam is currently being prosecuted for calling on her In Media readers to post links to pornographic websites and for including an artsy Jake Applebaum photo of a topless woman that she found on Flickr.
But how do the Mainlanders fit sex into their busy schedules, which include not only the massive amount of time and money spent on role-play with nurses and office ladies, but the female sex bloggers who spice up social life through fresh pinches of vulgarity and surrealism? Since the PRC has banned all western or Japanese porn industries and actively collaborates with companies such as Yahoo and Google to censor its Chinese sites, there is a lot of pressure on local sex bloggers to fit the bill. China’s new generation seems to be demanding a “netporn” that is a blend of commercial sex services, illegally shared sex products, a way to mediate personal relationships and to investigate the controversy surrounding issues of sexual lifestyle and queerness.

The nascent Mainland porn culture is influenced by overseas values and popular culture, yet less so by the amalgam of artful geeks or tattooed young feminists, pro-fat or transgendered queers, environmental activists or indie porn stars that have defined the western nets. Chinese bloggers are culturally more fractured and probably more readily commodified; news about their acts trickles in slowly and is widely frowned upon by most of Chinese media and public commentators. Blogs are massively monitored by ISP’s on request of the government and are often removed after complaints from citizens, specifically those used by sex workers to advertise services. But non-commercial sex culture is also on the PRC’s observations deck, and soft eroticism is equally rebutted, such as blogger Romantic Night’s collection of one hundred erotic, which was vilified in the news after he was reported to the police by a well-known CEO’s personal driver and then arrested for “distributing erotic culture in Beijing.”

There are still too few publications about China’s sex web, but sociologist James Farrer has carefully dissected the most renowned sex blogger, the Guandong-based Mu Zimei, by committing a detailed ethnographic case study of orbits of adversiarial debate around her blog. His article pieces together “naturalistic patterns of debate” that vibrated strongly around her creamy, literary-poetic vulgarity and lucid defense of the one night stand. Farrer’s approach to political media analysis includes the life of tiny arguments and online puttering, as well as loud moral judgment by the highest-ranking communists contesting the leading voices of reason and support, such as academic scholar Lin Yinhe. Lin Yinhe was recently told to shut up and disappear from the limelight by unnamed higher officials, yet she parodied their official revolutionary jargon in an ambiguous farewell speech. Mu Zimei herself also played with the media, requiring journalists to sleep with her before granting an interview with the headline “the longer the sex, the longer the interview”. Her blog received millions of hits, yet the viewpoints of her commentators were again about 90% negative. The government finally shut down one of the “mothers”of sex blogging, but her dialogics rippled into many other corners of the web.
Mainland sex bloggers have created their own versions of networking and bawdiness that are sometimes reported on in international and Anglophone news organs such as the Asian Sex Gazette. For example, the unrepentant bare-arsed blogger Qin Dai created a buzz by revealing snapshots of her naked buttocks. Qin Dai came under attack and compared her writings frivolously to those of Franz Kafka, yet was viciously attacked by literary connoisseur Annie Rose. Blogger Mu Mu started posting images of her naked body while refusing to reveal her face and made people speculate about the motives behind her images of the decapitated body. Blogger Lost Sparrow compiled an encyclopedia of lovemaking noises based on the idea that would sound different in different parts of China. Blogger HairongTianTian posed in the nude, but hit the news after collecting two thousand pictures of men’s limp penises. She didn’t call herself a man-hater or a feminist, but wanted to think about the “the root of Chinese masculinity” or show the cock in its most mundane state, as opposed to focusing on the culturally overrated state of male potency and erection.

But have female bloggers been acknowledged to be an important part of women’s culture in China? In 2005 the city of Beijing organized Blognight to encourage female bloggers to upload a selection of their most beautiful photographs and participate in a beauty pageant. All citizens were encouraged to vote on “the most beautiful blogger” who would get a hefty a cash award. The jury received about 300 submissions from bloggers in various poses, fetching dresses and lingerie, and one photo from Hedgehog Mu who had sent a photograph in the full nude. Hedgehog Mu’s submission got negative reviews all over the web, and her luscious body was voted down by the jury. But what could have been a more apt response to this kind demand for spectacular flesh within internet culture? The female blogosphere is lubricated and to the point, making way for a specifically Chinese version of social dialogics and online sex culture.

The PRC understands that in its move towards capitalist-driven sex sites and social networks, people will explore novel identities and commerce, as they will be more immersed in a voyeuristically driven medium. The government itself is the big brother voyeur who likes to watch its posing citizens, who showcases and punishes the starlets of sex culture by creating medieval moralistic fables and by encouraging its citizens to vote. The gaze is on but the vote almost always comes out against sex culture. Some recent attempts at citizen’s self-governance on the web even have come with a cash award for the most nosy person. For instance, the Guangdong public security department agreed with local telecommunications companies to pay a reward of up to 2,500 yuan (US$309) to people who would report on any type of online porn traffic. For each of the reported websites, the provincial department would pay the first informant 1,000 yuan to 2,500 yuan in thirty days after they confirm the information and close the case.

The PCR has vowed to win the war on pornography and carries out random arrests, giving harrowing jail sentences to people who are found guilty of distributing commercial and non-commercial pornography, either by using local or overseas web hosts and servers. In July 2005, the Asian Sex Gazette published a report about China’s “greatest Internet Crime trial” where eleven defendants were charged and sent to prison for distributing obscenities. Five of those were university students who had been invited by Fujian resident Wang Rong to help administer an online bulletin board system (bbs) called 99bbs.com. They all lived in different parts of the country and knew each other mostly through their nicknames on the bbs. The site 99bbs.com started as a general interest forum and then offered pornographic content to 75,000 fee-paying members in a separate porn section. The website was hosted on an overseas server, but nevertheless fell under Chinese jurisdiction. Except for the main administrator Wang Rong, the defendants did not get paid for their services in administering the board and they used it as a social network to write personal stories, to share files, and for personal communication.

Since Wang Rong had fled to the USA, defendant number one was the female Shao Yong, who was arrested less than one month after she was promoted to "school principal" of the bbs and she was sentenced to twelve years in prison. In an interview posted on the Sex Gazette, she writes that she used the website to post her writings and journals “to become immersed in the Internet and to make friends.” It was a case of honor for her to be promoted by Wang to be the site administrator (these admin posts were labeled “teacher director” and “school principal”) and was promised a fee of 500 yuan by Wang to pay for her Internet bill, but she never received the money. China’s greatest Internet crime trial was an attempt of the government not to eradicate porn distribution but to sporadically undermine the very vitality of a new social network. China’s Internet trials no doubt have a strong effect on web users in China and neighboring countries. Perhaps it is not a huge surprise that there is hardly any discussion internationally or in Hong Kong about these trials, and that we keep projecting post-revolutionary wetness onto the MMainland.

Hong Kong’s In Media site is located at http://www.inmediahk.net/public/index
For information about Oiwan Lam’s case, see http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/07/16/hong-kong-gv-editor-oiwan-lam-faces-court-battle-over-flickr-photo/

Beijing Daily, May 18, 2007.

China's unrepentant bare-assed blogger, Asian Sex Gazette www.asiansexgazette.com/asg/china/china05news92.htm (12 Nov. 2006)

Mu Mu: China's nude breed of blogger, Asian Sex Gazette,
www.asiansexgazette.com/asg/china/china05news86.htm (11 Nov. 2006)

Beijing Daily, May 14, 2006 http://yaguo.xiangshu.com/blog.php?do_showone/tid_1413.html

China: Reporting Porn Websites can Bring Money, Asian Sex Gazette,http://www.asiansexgazette.com/asg/china/china05news42.htm (15 Nov. 2006)

Information about the trial was reprinted at http://zonaeuropa.com/20050514_1.htm