China’s pulse races

Headlines like “Sex, Porn Pack Berlin Film Festival,” features on the Pamela Anderson cartoon “Stripperella” and photos of Paris Hilton examining her cleavage might easily be the work of the National Enquirer or Globe. But the Chinese state news agency?

In the China Youth Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Youth League, readers can find articles on adult toys, while the People’s Daily has published features on Shanghai’s Ancient Sex Culture Museum, once a source of government ire.

And then there is state agency Xinhua, which regularly displays photos of scantily clad women on its website. In a four-day period in early May, Xinhua ran pictures from the Miss Bikini China contest; a spread of foreign swimsuit models, one of whom was wearing only a bikini bottom; provocative shots of foreign women under the English headline “How many luring poses can you imagine?”; photos from the swimsuit competition of last year’s Miss Universe contest; and, for good measure, pictures from a Thai transvestite beauty contest.

Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs a Beijing advertising firm and keeps an English-language blog on the Chinese media at www.danwei.org, says the change has been vast. “You would never have the idea that there was any sex in China from reading the People’s Daily five or six years ago,” he says. Now, “There’s a lot more lifestyle stuff. The party has decided it doesn’t want to control people’s private lives.”

The explosion of suggestive images is partly a reflection of changes in Chinese society -- many sociologists say China is in the midst of a sweeping sexual revolution -- and partly due to market reforms. In 2003, the Chinese government introduced far-reaching regulations that require many newspapers and magazines to try to turn a profit. Television is undergoing a similar, though more gradual, transformation. Xinhua remains state-owned, but it competes for hits with NASDAQ-traded Internet portals Sina and Sohu, which publish their share of racy content. “They have less of a profit motive,” Goldkorn said of Xinhua, “but they must be looking at their visitor stats.”

The government has not given the press free rein to publish material with sexual themes, but the way censorship is carried out means that some media outlets can get away with quite a lot. Rather than issue top-down decrees, Beijing’s censors primarily react to existing material, so websites, whose content is easily removable, and publications far from Beijing, which are less likely to attract censors’ attention, can take more chances. Still, articles on topics such as “China’s Janet Jackson,” a TV star who has twice revealed a breast in public, and the incidence of erectile dysfunction among China’s urban men are now common in the national media.

Beyond the state-owned news outlets, once the country’s sole purveyor of information, several recently launched men’s magazines are mining the territory opened by Western ladmags. Mangazine (with the emphasis on man, not manga) gives readers photos of coy, fully clothed women and features on sexy topics, and the Chinese edition of FHM provides discreetly posed centerfold nudes and articles like “I Want an Orgasm, Not Romance.”

Menbox publishes spreads of nearly nude men that seem targeted at a male audience, but it stops short of defining itself as a gay magazine.

The new men’s magazines are showing strong numbers -- FHM has a circulation of 330,000, while Mangazine sells 200,000 copies a month. “China is one of our most important territories,” said Chris Mooney, international editorial director of Emap, the company that owns FHM. “We’re very happy with how the magazine is doing there.”

The fate of China’s men’s magazines, however, is still unclear. Both FHM and Menbox appear to be gauging the reaction of the censors, following up risque issues with tamer ones. Maxim, which hopes to join the mix, is in continuing talks about a Chinese edition.

Until it reaches the newsstand, however, Chinese consumers have Xinhua. In January the state news agency posted photos of a bikini-clad Laura Prepon accompanied by a short interview on its website. The content, grabbed from the “girlfriend of the day” section of the Maxim site, is labeled with Maxim’s logo.

Online titillation

Perhaps the best gauge of the government’s tolerance of sexual content is the Internet, where material is decentralized and spontaneous, but heavily censored. According to a report released in April by the Open Net Initiative, a research group run out of Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Toronto, China has the most sophisticated Internet filtering system in the world, with at least 30,000 censors in police units around the country.

China has made much of its campaign against online pornography, but a wide range of sexual content remains accessible to its 94 million Internet users. The Open Net Initiative report found that the Chinese government blocks only seven of the top 100 Google results for “pornography” and three of the results for “sex.”

“There is censorship of the Chinese Internet, but there’s a lot more tolerance of sexual content,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. “Online sexual materials are everywhere if you do a Google search and you know where to go.”

Take, for, example, the case of Li Li, a young magazine columnist in the southern city of Guangzhou, who began blogging about her sexual exploits under the name Muzi Mei in June 2003. Li exposed some of the problems caused by rapid social change -- she said she had no knowledge of birth control when she started having sex -- as she captured national attention with her unrelenting frankness. She appeared in Chinese Cosmopolitan and Mangazine, and the state press published lengthy features on the “Muzi Mei craze.”

In November 2003, the government decided that the story had gotten out of hand and banned the publication of a book of Li’s blog entries. Li shut down her website and the media abandoned the story, but her writing resurfaced on other sites, while articles about her remained in the archives of sites like Xinhua. Since then, other women have begun writing about their sex lives online, and one recently posted nude photos of herself on her blog. Li, meanwhile, has quietly started keeping another blog, still using the name Muzi Mei, and had her book published abroad.

The government’s treatment of Li is lenient compared with the punishment it gives to online political dissidents, Xiao said. “The mainstream media can debate on her and criticize her,” he said. “Her book may have been banned, but she can travel. She has considerable freedom in that dimension.” One month after Li’s book was banned, online essayist Kong Youping was imprisoned for advocating democratic reforms, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. He is now serving a 15-year term.

Liu Kang, director of Duke University’s program in Chinese media and communication studies, said the Chinese government’s attitude toward sexual content is ambivalent. “It’s like the way they treat copyrights -- it’s half-hearted,” he said. “The Communist government could be very effective in cracking down on certain areas, but looking at those sectors, it’s pretty ineffective.”

Competition in the media

In 2003, the Chinese government stipulated that newspapers and magazines must earn at least half of their revenue from voluntary subscriptions. In the following months, it shut down 673 publications that did not comply. Since then, many newspapers have effectively become financially independent, and a number have adopted flashy tabloid-style formats in an effort to attract readers and advertising.

Television has become similarly competitive. China restructured the state-owned CCTV last year to attract foreign investment and venture capital, with plans to make certain stations independent within three years. While China had just 100 channels 20 years ago, it now has 2,100, and in the largest markets stations vie aggressively for ratings.

At the same time, President Hu Jintao, who some had hoped would work toward a free press, has made it clear that many of the topics that might sell newspapers and attract viewers -- like corruption, police brutality and political reform -- remain off-limits. In early 2004 the government fired the staff of the popular Southern Metropolitan News, which had exposed the cover-up of the SARS outbreak, and jailed two of its editors. Editors and programming directors now find themselves in a bind: They must produce content that is relevant and attention-grabbing while avoiding an ever-shifting list of forbidden topics.

No wonder, then, that TV stations increasingly turn to racy content to attract viewers. While graphic sexual imagery is prohibited, infomercials and fashion programs frequently play to audiences’ prurient interests, and late-night talk shows feature discussions on sexual health. “Sensational programs and tabloid news have really become the order of the day,” said Duke’s Liu, who is writing a book on Chinese television.

Dramas have also become more titillating, as sophisticated, locally produced series eclipse the low-budget historical sagas that once dominated Chinese television. “(Really, Really Want to) Talk About Love,” a series that recently aired in Beijing, for example, unabashedly billed itself as the Chinese “Sex and the City,” and the description wasn’t far off. At times, in fact, “Talk About Love” ripped off whole plot lines from the American series. Gone are the explicit discussions of sex, but the show finds a lot of space for suggestion.

In one of the series’ final episodes, one woman -- the Chinese answer to Charlotte -- announces that she has not yet slept with her fiance. Her friends are shocked. “You have to see if shoes fit before you buy them!” one of them exclaims. “What if your man is really a woman?” another asks. The couple ends up between the sheets the night before the wedding, and, although the suggestion of sex traditionally ends at the bedroom door on Chinese TV, viewers see them in bed together the next morning.

With a cast of famous actors and pop stars, “Talk About Love” took fourth and fifth in the ratings for dramas in its time slot in Shanghai, and though it did less well nationally, it has already spawned a book.

The press, meanwhile, has been happy to write about it all -- and even to point out where the show’s producers held back. As one headline on the entertainment portal 163.com put it, the series “Talks About Love, Not Sex.” But it will not be long, one imagines, before another show takes that final leap.