The ongoing, massive pro-democracy demonstrations now taking place in the semi-autonomous Chinese city of Hong Kong have brought out more than one of every four people living in the city 7.4 million, and now the protests have even extended to porn sites there, as well.
The United Kingdom claimed Hong Kong as British territory in 1841, capturing the city in a conflict known as the First Opium War. But in 1997, the U.K. returned Hong Kong to China—on the condition that the city-state would remain mostly self-governing for five decades.
But with three decades to go, the totalitarian Chinese government has become impatient and is already attempting to gain tighter control over Hong Kong. The current protests were sparked by a new law that would allow individuals arrested in Hong Kong to be extradited back to the People’s Republic of China for trial—a situation that protesters say is the first major step toward eroding and ultimately eliminating Hong Kong democracy, according to an analysis by Vox.com.
Even porn site operators in Hong Kong have become so passionate about the pro-democracy cause that at least two sites have gone offline, replacing their home pages with messages imploring users to take to the streets and join the demonstrations, according to a report by the Australian site SBS News.
One well-trafficked site, ThisAV, last week replaced its home page with a message urging visitors to stop “jerking off at home” and get out in the streets to join the protests.
“We go onto the street not because we have hope or we think more people will make our action succeed,” the site’s home-page message said. “We know we need to do it no matter whether we shall succeed or not. Even a pig will scream before it is killed. Should we be killed but remain silent?”
Following the example set by ThisAV, a second Hong Kong porn site, AV01, also suspended its streaming of adult video in favor of a message proclaiming, “The government has failed you, the system has failed you, the society has failed you, do you want to fail yourself?”
While the pro-democracy passions of the porn site operators appear sincere, porn sites in Hong Kong have much to lose if China is allowed to snuff out democratic rule in the city. In China, porn is illegal and the internet is heavily censored. The Chinese government, as AVN.com has reported, now offers a $120,000 reward to informants who turn producers of pornography over to authorities—a tempting sum in a country where the average worker earns less than $11,000 per year.
Photo By Voice of America / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
