Monday, May 21, 2007    Text size: 

The blogger, identified only by his surname Li, posted the stories to a blog called “Hazy Night.” According to a spokesman from the Beijing Public Security Bureau quoted by Xinhua, the blog received close to 100,000 visits between August 2006 and April of this year, when police began to receive complaints about the blog’s content.

Li was arrested last Tuesday by police from Beijing’s university district, and charged with distributing Internet pornography, according to Xinhua. Individuals convicted of selling obscene content in China face jail terms of up to three years, but Xinhua reports that the law may not apply to Li, as the stories were freely available on his site, and not being “sold.”

According to ShanghaiDaily.com, the blog contained a warning that stated it was intended for readers over the age of 18, and featured stories on topics ranging from masturbation and consensual sex between adults to darker themes like rape, incest and pedophilia.

The arrest of Li was part of a larger effort on the part of the Chinese government to screen out “decadent and backward ideological and cultural material” posted on the web. Since the government announced its campaign last month, police have shut down 1,450 websites and deleted more than 30,000 “obscene” images, according to Xinhua.

When its crackdown on adult sites was announced last month, Chinese officials blamed content posted on foreign websites for a wide range of problems being experienced in China.

“The boom of pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China’s young minds,” deputy public security minister Zhang Xinfeng said in April, adding that the “inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China’s cyberspace.”

The Chinese Politburo weighed in on the issue of controlling online content in April as well, openly stating that the Internet is interfering with the Communist Party’s propaganda efforts.

“Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of Socialist advanced culture [and] adhere to correct propaganda guidance,” stated a summary of a summary of a recent Chinese Politburo meeting read on state television. “Internet cultural units must conscientiously take on the responsibility of encouraging development of a system of core socialist values.”

The Politburo also called for expanding Marxist education online, and a consolidation of “the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere.”