14 DAY TRIAL // As a part of a campaign that saw so far the shutting down of 44,000 (no typo there) websites and the arrest of 868 people last year, Reuters reports the closing of the largest real time porn site based in China. The crusade against online pornography and "unhealthy" web content was initiated after president Hu Jintao railed down the content available on the Internet, claiming to be a danger to social stability. The "holy" war has not seen its end with this, despite this being "the apple of its eye," it will go on until the close of the Beijing Olympics in September 2008.
The latest site to be closed charged its subscribers for watching real live strip shows or some other pornographic performances, according to the Xinhua news agency, quoted by Reuters: "This operation started up in the second half of 2006 and took in more than 1 million yuan ($137,000) in just three months."
The problem with the whole action is that it is somehow included in the policy of registering every video sharing site (thus including porn related websites) with the Government or placing them under Gov control. DO I hear voices claiming that it is against the basic human rights? That's right, but it's a communist regime there, so none of that really matters actually.
According to Reuters, some Rights groups "have said the campaign has been used as a thinly veiled pretext to crack down on dissent and round up online dissidents ahead of the Olympics." While that is most likely to have happened (let's not forget the Yahoo! scandal of October - November last year), it is not the case with the site that just got shut down. It had its servers elsewhere than on Chinese soil, namely in Taiwan, but they got confiscated. Bad luck for many, I guess.