One Chinese computer science student is going to jail for a year, sentenced for running an Internet porn service, while a second is going for five years for starting one while he was a student, under the Communist government’s crackdown on Internet porn and other “impure” Web sites.
Identified in news reports only by his surname, Xie, the Zhejiang University of Technology computer science student was sentenced in a Hangzhou court September 28, after police discovered Xie earned the Chinese equivalent of about $9,200 (160,000 yuan) since launching the porn site in March 2003. He was reputed to have had at least 1,500 paid members to the site.
Dong Haibin, on the other hand, was sentenced to five years. It wasn’t known yet whether any income he made from his porn site was confiscated by the Chinese government, as they did with Xie’s income. Xie was also fined the equivalent of $2,416 (20,000 yuan).
The Chinese Internet porn crackdown, which conjoined with a new crackdown on Web sites that criticize the Communist Party and government corruption, began in earnest in mid-July. Before the summer ended, the government announced that the crackdown would include sentences of up to life imprisonment.
But Agence France Presse said that recent Chinese Web surfing has shown Chinese still have “relative ease” in finding porn sites based outside China in spite of the government’s mandatory gateway blocking. Chinese citizens searching for porn based in their own country, AFP said, routinely get government-approved sites mostly tied to sex education.
