Toupee-wearing 70-year-old government man Liu Xiaozhen hates porn. It gets him all red in the face, causes his heart to skip a beat. Yet the purity of his soul is but a small price to pay for the good of the country. At the Hunan provincial anti-pornography office, Liu spends all day combing through hours of porn footage and classifying what he sees as either “pornography,” “obscene,” or “other.”
A few weeks ago we introduced you to a very special line of work in available only in China: The porn identification officer. A non-profit devoted to “public safety” had placed an ad for the position on the country’s largest social network, and thousands of eager young men soon applied. But now, thanks to a report by a Hunan news station, we’ve had a glimpse behind the curtain, and it ain’t pretty
“You have to watch even if you don’t want to watch,” Liu said. “But when you’re in this job, you have to watch very closely, and once you’ve watched, you classify.”
Once you watch, you classify. You can almost see the mantra playing in behind the glazed-over eyes of the other men in the office, as the camera pans to reveal a cadre of middle-aged dudes slouching in front of computer screens, clicking mouse buttons with all the enthusiasm of a data entry analyst. Once you watch, you classify.
Liu is no ordinary anti-porn foot soldier. He apparently won an award back in 2008 for an essay he penned on his profession, and his provincial crew has looked over 13,000 confiscated videos in the first quarter alone.
Porn in China has a tendency to intersect with politics and the Internet in strange ways. Following a spate of sex scandals involving Chinese officials last year, most of which were exposed on social media, enterprising criminals used photo editing software to superimpose local officials’ faces into porn clips, then blackmail them.
H/T Beijing Cream | Photo via Nandu