BEIJING— Recent reports profiling China’s professional porn watchers charged with monitoring and censoring adult material has spawned a satellite TV show that’s quickly become one of the country’s hottest Internet videos.
The South China Morning Post reported that the Hunan province porn cops revealed their day jobs busting illegal porn in a rare TV interview that included watching more than 700 full DVDs in one week.
“When you’re in this job, even if you don’t want to watch anymore, you have to keep watching closely,” a seemingly bored 70-year-old, Liu Xiaozhen said.
The director of the Hunan Office Against Pornography and Illegal Publications told the Post that the Hunana Satellite TV show was authentic and Xiaozhen was an pornography identification officer in their bureau.
Although the show censored much of the porn content being monitored by the government workers, it detailed just what the workers do in their daily grind as the cameras panned “over a veritable mountain of porn in their office.”
“In the beginning, the office was small, and everyone could only watch the videos inside that office,” Xiaozhen told the Post. “We carried out the examinations on our own. It felt awkward. My face and ears often turned red, and my heart would often skip a beat.”
The official said that his job entailed watching and categorizing explicit scenes originating from the West, Japan and Korea from beginning to end to be sure the producers don’t sneak in porn in the later stages of a production.
Also on the offcers' watch list is the level of “illegality." Some movies are considered obscene while others that contain story lines are simply considered porn.
Last week, the bureau seeking new officers initiated a province-wide search and reportedly stated that it prefers elderly applicants — ideally who are married and “trained” — but was unclear as to the defintion of "trained."
The Post reported that the provincial team has confiscated 13,000 indecent products in the first quarter of this year.
