BEIJING – The founder of China’s largest pornographic website received a sentence of life imprisonment from the Taiyuan Intermediate People’s Court on Wednesday, and eight of the site’s organizers were jailed for lesser terms.
Chen Hui, a 28-year-old man who launched the now-defunct “Pornographic Summer” in 2004 before starting three other adult sites, was found guilty for charging registration fees of $25 to $33 to some of the 600,000 members of the sites. In addition to the jail time, the People’s Court ordered the confiscation of 100,000 yuan (about $12,500).
Since large portions of the money had been spent or placed in foreign bank accounts, police said it was hard to know for sure how much money Chen made from the sites.
According to state media, Chen evaded closure by changing the domain name and server regularly.
China is famously strict about pornography. Adult content was nearly wiped out under Mao Zedong’s puritanical regime, although it began to resurface once economic reforms began and social controls loosened. Cyber police routinely patrol the Internet for “objectionable” content, although politically motivated sites usually are more common targets.