China Porn Crackdown Continues As 17 Arrested For ‘Lewd Content’

Two months after Chinese authorities arrested two owners of a popular erotic camming site, HuaHua, completing a law enforcement sweep of 20 individuals connected to the site, as AVN.com reported, the crackdown on porn continues. China not only has the world’s largest population, but also is one of the world’s most restrictive when it comes to porn. In fact, a recent ranking placed China second only to North Korea in internet censorship overall, with not only a highly sophisticated online security network known popularly as China’s “Great Firewall,” but a force of more than 2 million Chinese “internet police” who constantly scan the web, social media, chat rooms and other online forums looking for adult material, or anything else that the Chinese government considers detrimental to society. But actual, real-life police also appear to spend significant time and resources combatting online porn as well.  On Wednesday, authorities in China’s bustling, coastal Jiangsu Province announced that they had taken into custody 17 suspects in a pornography “ring” that ran a popular porn site, which according to China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, “hired photographers and cameramen to supply over 300,000 pornographic images and videos to its paid membership of more than 3,000.” The “gang” had earned about $580,00 from running the porn site—in a country where the average per capita income stands barely over $3,100 per year, according to United States Federal Reserve statistics. In other words, each of the 17 arrested porn site operators and content creators could have earned more than 10 times the average wage of their fellow Chinese workers. According to police, the now-arrested porn producers were mostly “young (and) highly educated,” but were drawn to porn by “the handsome remuneration.” Photo By Frank Yu/Wikimedia Commons