BEJING — Despite its attack on civil liberties, China's crackdown on porn may be a godsend to some of its citizens looking for work.
More than 4,000 people have reportedly applied for new government appraiser of online sexual content jobs since the openings were announced in April.
The porn watchers have to be between 20 and 35, can be male or female and would earn up to $32,000 a year. Chinese Internet companies including Baidu, Tencent and Kingsoft have posted the openings in an effort to comply with the government’s "Clean Internet Campaign 2014."
About 100 citizens have reportedly been called in for interviews already.
China’s latest attempt to ban online porn orders game producers and web portals to remove any porn or "sexually suggestive" content that could include depictions of girls or female cartoons wearing sleeveless T-shirts, shorts or bikinis. Even animated physical contact is taboo.
WantChinaTimes.com reported that the VOD portals Sina and Sohu were shuttered after two of Sohu's original video series were considered to contain porn, a move that at one point resulted in a 20 percent reduction in China's Internet traffic.
And Reuters reported last week that Sina, which owns Sina Weibo (known as "China's Twitter"), got hit with a $815,038 fine for hosting "unhealthy and indecent content."
American and European TV shows have also been hit, and the microblog accounts of two Japanese adult video stars have been regularly interrupted.
Job candidates are tested on their knowledge about adult video performers, porn brands and how to distinguish sexual content in music and text.
But the job may not be as fun as it sounds.
Liu Chunqi, a police officer and sexual content appraiser in the city of Harbin, said it was a dreadful job.
"When I do the appraisal, all I am thinking about is whether the content meets the standards for sexual content or whether the content in the video or disc is publicly advertising sex or showing sex. Some people think it's just watching porn, but it's not. Sometimes it makes me throw up," Chunqi told website AhLife.com.