Katrien Jacobsthey were familiar with Internet pornography, and how they would access and covet it despite
strict warnings and government regulations. While the Chinese Communist Party continues to
promote a war on pornography as an aspect of dissident culture, I wanted to find out if young
adults experience revitalized desires around stigmatized pornographic products and idols.
Through these interviews I discovered that both women and men in China are using, and
commenting on, sexually explicit media to explore novel tastes, desires, and identities, in order
to grapple with edgy and sexually explicit content, and to question the socially engrained roles
of Chinese morality. Sexually explicit materials are spread out widely over the Internet and can
be accessed by means of using shared code words, such as “movies of life” (生活電影), which
broadcasts that they are available yet hidden among other types of information. People share
these code words through microblogging sites or the instant messaging service Tencent QQ.
When typing in those code words, web users are directed towards three types of sites: cloud
storage websites where movies can be downloaded directly; torrent seeds that have to be down-
loaded by means of installed p2p software; or migratory porn sites that are hosted mostly on
overseas web servers. In 2010, scholars at the Department of Computer Science and Technology
at Xi’an Jiaotong University confirmed that there is a steady rise of such porn sites, despite the
fact that these sites are easily deleted in ongoing government crackdowns (Wu 2010). Between
March 29, 2009 and January 25, 2010 the researchers used two different online monitoring
systems to search the mainland China Internet—an advanced web crawler and pornographic
content monitor. In recent years, web users have become more wary of these porn sites as they
often contain viruses and are also used as phishing sites to acquire people’s personal information.
Therefore, sharing files and links to databases on instant messaging groups have become one
of the preferred methods. Male interviewees take pride in the fact that they can share databases
despite government surveillance and the routines of deletion. One of the interviewees expressed
this view when discussing his preferred view of porn sharing via Tencent QQ, which hosts
many groups for people to download movies, such as “love action groups:”
Based on my own experience, these groups are not directly censored by the government.
The company Tencent may censor them only if somebody reports that you are dis-
seminating inappropriate content. They could react then by disabling the account for a
few days. Or the harshest punishment would be deleting your QQ identity altogether,
but that holds only for the individual, and the group will still exist. Therefore, QQ
Groups may be the safest and liberal online communities to share porn.It is generally believed that the war on pornography is a flawed governmental incentive and
web users take pride in being able to share materials illegally. Another male interviewee, Yang,
explains it in a more poetic way:
We have a common saying that if virtue rises one foot, vice will rise ten. The govern-
ment will always have its policies against sex but we always know how to find it.Yang further explains that he is attached to his ways of “Jumping the Great Fire Wall” and access-
ing sites that are restricted in China. Rather than hoping that central government will legalize
and organize his online pleasures through legalized porn industries, he is devoted to navigating
the shady databases of the pornosphere.
Porn users take pride in their methods of navigating censorship, while sometimes provid-
ing humorous commentary on repressive government incentives. Since 2009, Chinese neti-
zens have been proactive in defending their “right to pornography” against ongoing rounds of