LOS ANGELES—Oh, the irony. In the United States, Apple is known as a hardliner when it comes to adult content appearing within its precious walled garden. In China, on the other hand, authorities are increasingly alarmed about Apple’s complicity in poisoning its citizens with porn. Or so they say.
Friday, a consumer protection arm of the Chinese government released a report that accused the Cupertino-based technology giant of avoiding taxes and spreading pornographic material. The charges were published in the Legal Daily newspaper.
He Shan, the head of the association, said of the tax evasion charge, "Apple uses the internet to by-pass Chinese customs and reach Apple iPhone users directly. Apple must pay customs duties to our nation."
The porn charge was levied by Peking University criminal law scholar Kang Shuhua, who said Apple was criminally liable for allowing porn to spread within the country. "This salacious, malignant tumor is eroding our nation’s way of doing things,” he said. “Apple must delete this obscene content."
The report was made by The China Association of Consumer Protection Law, a subsidiary of the government-sanctioned China Law Society. The newspaper the report was printed in is under the direction of the Communist Party’s central Politics and Law Committee. That makes the report the basic equivalent of an official government warning.
This is the country’s second recent swipe at Apple for allegedly disseminating pornography in China. The April 17 version of the People’s Daily also named Apple as being one of 198 companies under investigation for spreading porn.
According to the South China Morning Post, “In March, China Central Television and People’s Daily lambasted the Cupertino, California-based Apple for providing inferior service to Chinese customers.
“On April 1,” it continued, “Apple chief executive Tim Cook apologized to Chinese consumers and later in the month said he was optimistic about the company’s sales growth in China, the world’s second-largest economy. Apple is the world’s largest technology company in market capitalization.”
There was no direct response from Apple to the porn accusation, however. That may be because they simply don’t know what pornography is, seeing as they have never been able to define it appropriately.
