A woman described as China’s “porn queen” has been sent to prison for four years in what may be the first conviction in China’s national crackdown on porn and other “negative influences” in cyberspace.
Wang Yanli operated a live audiovisual chat room charging visitors for seeing live, four-hour strip shows she organized, paying up to $72.5 dollars (600 yuan) to watch the shows. Reports indicated the site had about 110 members signed up to watch the shows between December and February, netting Wang about $3,624 (30,000 yuan) in profit.
Wang was convicted by a People’s Court in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu, according to reports derived from Chinese state television.
Since mid-July, China’s Internet crackdown has shut down over seven hundred Websites and produced over two hundred known arrests. It also prompted the country’s publishing industry to call for mutual refusal to publish “obscene” materials.
And now, according to one report, it has prompted China’s largest mobile phone operator to crack down on porn sites using its short message services. The state news agency Xinhua reported August 15 that China Mobile would step up a crackdown it began earlier this summer against mobile porn.
Online porn isn’t the only problem bedeviling Chinese cyberspace. China Mobile has also cracked down on spam, suspending Sohu as a supplier of cell phone picture services for a year for unsolicited marketing. That followed rival Sina saying China Mobile had temporarily suspended its own interactive voice response service, after Sina offered toll-free telephone sex services to mobile customers.
Financial analysts Think Equity said the suspension would be “devastating” to Sohu, which was apparently counting on phone messaging to make up falling text messaging sales.
