China has officially declared war on Internet porn, and set a target of purging the web of sexually-explicit images, stories and AV clips within a six month timescale. According to the China View official online news agency the Vice Minister of MPS, Zhang Xinfeng, is quoted as stating “the boom of pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds. The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace.”

Looking deeper at what Zhang has said, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is just the same old same old spectre of Chinese state censorship that has led to the ‘Great firewall of China’ debacle. Not least because it would appear that the official campaign will target a lot more than just porn and sexually explicit stories. Indeed, Zhang has made it very clear that illegal on-line lotteries, contraband trade, fraud and then the all too expected bombshell of “content that spreads rumors and is of a slanderous nature" will be included in the crackdown. Exactly what is considered 'spreading rumors' is, one assumes, up to the State to decide.

Not that Chinese attention to online porn is anything new, some months back in November 2006 one Chen Hui was arrested and convicted to life imprisonment for running the largest pornographic website in China which was said to contain nine million images and articles and have a membership of some 600,000 users. The fact is that online porn is already illegal in China, the great firewall routinely blocks it, and anyone caught participating in whatever capacity faces more severe punishment than being unsure about the future of their eyesight. What is new here, and what the crackdown is really all about, is coming down hard against the booming home grown domestic online porn trade in China which manages to bypass the firewall filtering and provides relatively easy access to the Chinese population.

The Ministry of Public Security continue to blame porn for major crime, and continue to announce their success in combating it. Rather bizarrely, the definition of major crime would appear to be at odds with that in the West. The latest official announcement from the Ministry, for example, includes the major crime of Wang from Yichang City in Hubei Province who had a no-clothes chat with a woman online and took photos of her which were used in an attempted blackmail plot against her. Abhorrent yes, major crime and indicative of the downfall of a nation, nope…