According to the country’s official news agency, the idea came about organically, as sales reps would often use adult clips to demonstrate hardware during sales pitches. One vendor said he offered to include a few clips on a Motorola E398 as an incentive to get a customer to buy and decided to continue making similar offering to other customers.
Vendors may not be able to keep using porn as a premium for much longer.
While China has seen sweeping changes in attitudes and openness about sex and the country has become by far the world’s largest supplier of sex toys, the Chinese government has stepped up efforts to keep its citizens from accessing Internet pornography.
While there is a large market for pirated adult DVDs, pornography remains strictly forbidden, and the government has gone to great lengths to keep porn from reaching its citizens, especially where the Internet is concerned.
The government controls all access to the web and has developed what is widely considered the most sophisticated state-run filtering initiative in the world, aimed squarely at keeping porn off of citizens’ computers, and at preventing the country’s 100 million web surfers from accessing porn.
Last year China began an extensive program of shutting down 47,000 unlicensed Internet cafes and 1,800 adult websites. The government employs more than 30,000 people to oversee the Internet seeking out both offending sites and users. Earlier this year, China broke up what it said was an extensive Internet porn ring, sentencing a dozen webmasters to jail sentences for distributing porn online.
The government isn’t likely to be any more tolerant of distribution through mobile devices.
A police spokesperson in Anhui said his department will be on the lookout for porn-as-premium schemes, but admitted that it is “difficult to discover and collect adequate evidence for prosecuting such cases.”