During Massive Coronavirus Lockdown, Chinese People Surfed Porn

In China, where the coronavirus pandemic originated and where the vast majority of cases and fatalities have occurred, the government took severe, authoritarian measures to stop the spread of the virus. In addition to placing its citizens under electronic surveillance to monitor their travel, and rounding up anyone suspected of contracting an infection, China locked down entire provinces—including the Wuhan province, where the virus appears to have first appeared. The strict measures left hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens effectively locked down, leaving them with a lot of free time on their hands. And despite the fact that porn is banned in the country, searching for porn online is exactly how the quarantined Chinese people chose to pass the time. Perhaps because porn is illegal in China, many of the internet searches used slang, or coded terms, according to a study by English-language China news site Abacus.   On China’s largest search engine, Baidu, searches for the word “maopian” saw a surge as the coronavirus crackdown took hold. What is maopian? According to Abacus, the word is a popular slang term for porn, though it translates roughly as “hair movie.” Even after Chinese workers were supposed to return to work in mid-February searches for porn-related terms continued to remain at steady, high levels, breaking the typical pattern that sees the searches spike on weekends and then sink during the week. Other code words for porn searched by the locked-down Chinese citizens included “Europe and US all free to watch,” as well as “A movie,” presumably an abbreviation of “adult movie,” according to the Abacus report. In fact, Chinese porn searches were so heavy that researchers in the United States who attempted to gather data on the Chinese coronavirus response used the volume of porn searches as an indicator of how many people were remaining home, according to John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at the Boston Children’s Hospital, who conducted research on China’s attempts to stem the viral outbreak. Though porn is banned in China, actually enforcing the ban in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people is a tall order. China relies on reports from its own citizens, offering rewards equivalent to $120,000 for informants who rat out porn producers. That sum is more than 10 times the average annual wage of a Chinese worker. Photo by GangstonTech / Wikimedia Commons