• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1821 0

’s even more interesting, 32 percent of Chinese said that the Internet broadens their sex life, compared with just 11 percent of Americans. A Fudan University poll in June 2010 of nine hundred female graduates at seventeen Shanghai universities revealed that 70 percent don’t think that one-night stands are immoral, while in 2007 a Shanghai-based doctor who runs a helpline for pregnant teenagers in the city reported that 46 percent of more than 20,000 girls who called the helpline since 2005 said they had sex with boys they met on the Web. The implications of China’s “hormone revolution” are not lost on the authorities, who are searching for ways to profit from it politically. The Chinese government, having cracked down on online pornography in early 2009, quickly lifted many of their bans, perhaps after realizing that censorship was a sure way to politicize millions of Chinese Internet users. Michael Anti, a Beijing-based expert on the Chinese Internet, believes this was a strategic move: “[The government must have reasoned that] if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won’t pay so much attention to political matters.”

It seems highly naïve to assume that political ideals—let alone dissent—will somehow emerge from this great hodgepodge of consumerism, entertainment, and sex. As tempting as it is to think of Internet-based swinger clubs that have popped up in China in the last few years as some kind of alternative civil society, it’s quite possible that, since the main ideological tenets of Chairman Mao’s thought have lost much of their intellectual allure, the Chinese Communist Party would find the space to accommodate such practices. Under the pressure of globalization, authoritarianism has become extremely accommodating.

Other governments, too, are beginning to understand that online entertainment—especially spiced up with pornography—can serve as a great distraction from politics. According to reports from the official Vietnam state news agency, officials in Hanoi were flirting with the idea of setting up “an orthodox sex Website”—replete with videos—that could help couples learn more about “healthy sexual intercourse.” This won’t be a surprise to most Vietnamese: Much of existing Internet censorship in the country targets political resources, while leaving many pornographic sites unblocked. As Bill Hayton, a former BBC reporter in the country observes, “the Vietnamese firewall allows youngsters to consume plenty of porn but not Amnesty International reports.” As online porn becomes ubiquitous, such restrictions may no longer be needed.

Unless the West stops glorifying those living in authoritarian governments, it risks falling under the false impression that if it builds enough tools to break through the barriers erected by authoritarian governments, citizens will inevitably turn into cheap clones of Andrei Sakharov and Václav Havel and rebel against repressive rule. This scenario seems highly dubious. Most likely, those very citizens would first get online to download porn, and it’s not at all clear if they would return for political content. One experiment in 2007 involved Good Samaritans in the West volunteering to lend their computer bandwidth, via a tool called Psiphon, to strangers in countries that control the Internet, in the hope that, once they got their first taste of unfettered online freedom, they would use that chance to educate themselves about the horrors of their regimes. The reality was more disappointing. As Forbes magazine described it, once liberated, the users searched for “nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears.” Freedom to browse whatever one wants is, of course, worth defending in its own right, but it’s important to remember that, at least from a policy perspective, such freedoms would not necessarily bring about the revolutionary democratic outcomes that many in the West expect.

Online Discontents and Their Content Intellectuals

Phillip Roth’s 1990 warning to the Czechs was also a perceptive observation that their most treasured public