China has been cracking down on adult websites since last July, officially, but now they've blocked a popular gay site, GayChinese.net, the focus of which is information and support amidst an apparent AIDS epidemic, not porn.
The website garnered 50,000 to 65,000 visits a day from mostly mainland Chinese before the government blocked the site beginning in April, manager Damien Lu – a UCLA theater professor – told reporters, saying he was uncertain as to why the nonpolitical, nonsexually explicit site got the block.
"We have no content that violates the Chinese government's rules," he was quoted as saying. "None of our staff have been contacted by the police." The site was created by a pair of gay Chinese men in 1999 and offers gay-oriented news and information including how to avoid HIV and AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases, with a question-and-answer forum on relationships, family interaction, and keeping sexual orientation away from prying government eyes.
Tala Dowlatshahi, the New York representative for press watchdog Reporters Without Borders, said that while the Chinese Internet population may have doubled in the past couple of years, the Communist regime's effort to clamp down on dissent and criticism has increased concurrently.
"In terms of accessibility of information to its own citizens the Chinese government is clearly not in support of that," she told AVNOnline.com. "With various epidemics in that region that could potentially hit mass populations, the government clearly doesn't want to be criticized."
Part of the impetus, Dowlatshahi said, often comes when the Chinese government feels pressure from other countries, particularly trading partners, to act more swiftly in crises like health epidemics, which might be seen as an opening to dissidents to ramp up criticism of the regime. "The impetus [becomes] to clamp down on any information deemed critical to the government," she said.
GayChinese.net remains accessible elsewhere around the world, for the most part, and Lu told reporters the site has been scrupulous about editing out content the Communist government might have considered inappropriate. China is believed to have between 5 and 10 million gay men, and a government survey in 2004 – the first of its kind in China – determined that 80 percent of Chinese gay men admitted complete ignorance about HIV and AIDS.
A Chinese AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, was quoted as describing GayChinese.net as the "Xinhua news agency for gay[s]," referring to an official state news service, but also as the most important among several hundred gay-oriented Chinese websites. "Many people begin to understand themselves after reading the website, and many parents begin to understand their children," he told reporters.
Lu said GayChinese.net was valuable especially in smaller, more remote areas of China. "Other than the Internet, there's no way for people to find out information," he said. "In a small village, if you find you're gay, there aren't many ways for you to talk."
