Chinese Police Bust 20 in Crackdown on Popular Porn Camming Site

CYBERSPACE—Porn is illegal in China—despite the fact there appears to be a significant demand for it among the Chinese population—and in February of last year the Chinese government announced that it was stepping up its crackdown against what it called “vulgar” content, in order to “clean up” the online environment. By May of 2018, Chinese authorities had shut down about 22,000 porn sites, according to a report by TechNode. The owner of one streaming video platform, Hot TV, was sentenced to seven years in a Chinese prison for hosting just 28 adult videos, out of nearly 1,600 total videos on his site. As part of that crackdown, according to the South China Morning Post, Chinese police began an investigation into a popular camming site and app known as HuaHua, which reportedly went online in November of 2017 and raked in $2.3 million in profit in its first five months of existence. The site, like any legal camming site in the United States or elsewhere, featured members live streaming sexual performances. But due to the outlaw status of the site in China, users who wanted to view—and pay for—those performances had to obtain frequently changing secret codes often distributed through the Chinese messaging platform QQ, according to the Morning Post. The investigation into HuaHua—which frequently changed its name, host servers, and site design in an effort to stay a step ahead of police, according to a Gizmodo report—led to the arrest of 18 individuals in China over the past year. On April 26, Chinese police announced that they had tracked down and arrested the two owners of the site, identified only as a man named Hong, and a woman with the name Li. Both cam site operators had been on the lam in the Philippines when they were busted. According to the Morning Post report, Hong came up with the idea for the camming site as a way to make a quick buck when his video gaming business struggled. Photo By Simon Wedege Petersen / Wikimedia Commons