I want it all and I want it now — Freddie Mercury
China’s rationale for introducing built-in software to filter out porn sites is definitely candy coating, says this man on the ground in Shanghai. Government policy states it is to protect people, especially minors, from viewing porn? That’s horse manure buzzing with blue-bottle flies. It’s politically motivated, especially with the current 20-year anniversary of the bloody 1989 protests, which were brutally suppressed.
“Six, six, six,” says Da Ma enthusiastically to me outside his small DVD store. There are thousands of DVDs in the store and I don’t think there is anything that is not a pirate. I look at the DVDs he is showing me: the steamy covers help me realise he means “sex, sex, sex”. There are children in the store and porn videos are freely available. Now Da Ma, if I know the man, won’t sell to minors — and I hope he does not — but there is nothing stopping him. There are thousands of stores like his in Shanghai, selling pirate DVDs in the open with blatant disregard for stated Chinese law publicised regularly in both the English and Chinese newspapers here for the world to see and hopefully believe. “Crackdown on pirate DVDs” the newspapers will blare from time to time. My hairy arse in curlers. Well, that bit of agterwereld grooming is more likely to happen than any real crackdown on pirate DVDs in China. And I do shave regularly. Ask my wife, the Chook. To get to the point, porn is readily available in China anyway.
There is a set of rules in this country that go far deeper than the ostensible law displayed to the world. Those DVD stores are protected by syndicates, or racketeers, or gangs, take your pick. The police will not dare touch them. That bobby on the street supervisor boss’s boss is getting a cut on the deal, let me assure you. And besides, the bobby wants his cheap DVDs too. By January next year I will have been in this wonderful, sad, wacky country for five years: it is definitely run on corruption in a way I have never experienced in South Africa.
To give you a closer view of what I mean, here are two pictures I took of a typical “tricycle-lorry” very close to where I live on Beijing West Road. The vendor is selling DVDs from his vehicle, but is clearly not protected by a gang. He is nervous. In picture one, he is on the left, gesturing with his hand at me, glaring, trying to get me to stop taking an innocent photo:
Here, in picture two, he is walking away (far left), so as not to be associated with the tricycle-lorry and its stock of DVDs, still glaring, not realising all he has done is make himself look suspicious (the lady considering buying certainly is not suspicious):
Da Ma and the others trade with an air of innocence, openly and confidently. Usually the poor buggers selling from tricycle-lorries are not protected. Also, it is not a good idea to buy from them as their DVDs are inferior and you cannot go back and replace the DVD if it is faulty because you won’t find the vendor as his shop is not exactly stationary. Da Ma and the lads will gladly swap faulty DVDs and apologise. They look after their customers and their Chinese Mafia look after them. Everyone is happy. Just don’t stir the pot; you will get a tsunami.
Say a lawai (a foreigner) wants to open up a restaurant here in China. Firstly, as he is not a Chinese citizen, he has to have a Chinese partner by law. Secondly, his establishment is going to have to pass health and food regulation standards, get a licence to sell liquor … and none of this is achieved, none of it, without under-the-table deals, secret payouts to the government officials concerned. I know; I am friends or acquaintances with lawai who run businesses here. The lawai often like this: it means the various licences and health certificates to run the business are fast-tracked because the rails have been greased with some filthy lucre and they can start trading pronto. That’s just how it is. It is neither here or there if I am critical of the rules here. In the Serengeti, if you get out of your Land Rover, you had better know the rules, be a master of them in fact, or you are lunch. No different here in China, especially Shanghai, my home jungle which I love like a beautiful woman who scorns me one day and mollycoddles me the next. You know what I mean: she lets me sit on her lap and fondle her titties sometimes. Other days I get masochistic, trousers-around-the-ankles spanks I don’t even have to pay for.
So I have no doubt, even if the Green Dam filtering software becomes law in China, that an entirely new, shadowy, lucrative business will open up here before you can pick up tofu with your chopsticks: software to override the Green Dam software. I guarantee you that will happen. China has more than its fair share of computer geeks to do it. It’s like the urban legend that computer viruses were created to produce a huge money-spinning industry of anti-virus software. There is certainly more than a grain of truth to that legend.
So porn is actually freely available in this country, but tens of thousands of volunteers or paid workers are recruited in Shanghai (and Beijing) to stop online visits to porn sites. I know. I love looking at calendar girls from time to time; I detest hard porn, but babes wearing “next to nothings” or nothings for that matter, I confess I have an occasional infatuation. This includes watching Wimbledon women’s tennis which is more or less my idea of soft porn. Heck, those cute bums and silky thighs in skimpy tennis skirts and panties tensing as they bend over to receive a shot? (Yes of course I mean the fricken tennis balls whidding over the net at 120kph or whatever … what did you think I was thinking? Go wash your mouth out with soap.) Am I being disgusting? No, I am being male (same thing, some will say) and I am the first to admit that if I am on one of Shanghai’s marvellously long escalators and a pretty lass with fluttering mini-skirt is a few steps above me, I take a few steps down to get a better view. Eighty percent of literate heterosexuals of all ages will admit to appraising (read: celebrating) gorgeous female bodies; the rest are lying through their anal-retentive teeth. That’s just how we men are wired. And it’s bloody funny to watch us blokes with our mouths dropping and drooling while a darlin’ twitches her posterior past us on the street and we just about end up with neck cramp as our heads slowly swivel and painfully forget our necks can’t do a 360-degree turn. Notice I said “literate heterosexuals”. God knows what denial-laden excuses or sophistry the semi-literates and PCs will come up with (caveat: that’s my definition of semi-lits and PCs, see previous blog posts, especially “Is David Bullard arrogant?”).
But back to the soft porn sites. Even if I use a free proxy server here in China, which keeps my ISP anonymous and bypasses known filters, this is what happens. Gorgeous gals in next to nothings start to deliciously populate the screen with all the right bumps and bells and … darn diggety, up comes the sign like a middle finger from Mozilla Firefox: “connection interrupted”. This is followed by the teaser, “try again”. Of course the free proxy servers have wonderful suggestions for losing ISP addresses and creating new ones so I eventually get to see the angels anyway. The Chinese are really pissing against the hurricane.
(Oh and by the way, as reported by the Mail & Guardian and other news sources, Google and Mozilla Firefox were down this Wednesday, June 26, and it was the whole day in Shanghai, not just 10pm to 11pm. I assume spyware and blocks and filters were being loaded on the search engine.)
It is a bizarre set-up: you’re not supposed to be able to access porn on the internet but it is freely available in gang-protected shops. It seems supposed laws are made to actually create new jobs or industries in this country, be it human monitors of the net or a rife pirate DVD industry that includes porn. And of course the real reason is to prevent us from visiting politically sensitive websites. At this time of writing I just googled Tiananmen* Square (without using a free proxy server and all its smart suggestions) and went into one of the first suggested links, the Wikipedia reference. My reading of the bloody 1989 incident lasted about four seconds before the middle finger came up “connection disrupted”. I have an idea my ISP was recorded as attempting to access what should be public information. Incidentally, I also could not get into links advertising Beijing and Tiananmen Square as tourist destinations. That is where surely the Chinese government is shooting itself in the foot. Yet the odd thing is I can buy books in local Shanghai bookstores that are critical of both the current and previous Chinese governments. Sometimes the books are just wrapped in plastic, like a porn mag.
It just seems that corruption here — perhaps deliberately — creates its own Medusa’s head of industries and employment opportunities. Given the increasing unemployment, it is a way of surviving, maybe even thriving.
* Translation of Tiananmen: tian = sky, an = peace, and men = door or gate. Literally “sky peace gate” but the correct parsing would be “heaven’s gate”. Sadly ironical.
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