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Cutting off cell phone porn
By Peng Yining (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-23 07:54
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When Li Qiang opened a mysterious text message sent to his WAP-enabled cell phone in the early hours of the morning, what he saw shocked him to his core.
"It said, 'Come and have sex with a 19-year-old airline stewardess'. It was unsolicited porn sent directly to my cell phone at 1:28 am," the father of one told China Daily. "What if this was sent to a child's phone? What if my 16-year-old daughter had seen it?"
The text also contained a link to a website offering pornographic videos and images, he said. "It's shocking. I can't imagine what effect this would have on a young person's mind."
Li, 40, had only just bought his daughter an Internet-ready cell phone when he received the porn message on his own phone last March. He immediately called China Mobile, the network operator, to disable her phone's Web-browsing function.
"I will keep the restriction until she is 18," said the concerned parent. "This is a potential nightmare for parents, not to mention schools, where pornographic contact can easily be taken unnoticed into classrooms by students with portable Internet devices.
"I have even heard some parents plan to keep the Web restriction on their child's cell phone until they reach 22."
Li could be accused of overreacting in some Western societies where porn is only restricted to those under 21, but in China, a country that has devoted millions of yuan and man-hours to clamping down on obscene content, the issue has become for many parents a passionate battle to protect the minds and morals of young people.
A report by the China Internet Network Information Center in October showed there are now 181 million mobile WAP - wireless application protocol - users nationwide, with around a quarter aged 10 to 19.
"Most people probably use their phones to communicate and to check out healthy Web content but I am afraid vulgar material could be pushed inadvertently onto youngsters. You don't have to search for porn anymore, now it is delivered to you whether you want it or not," said Li.
As a researcher for the Chinese Academy of Sciences' institute of policy and management, Li used his obscene text experience to launch a six-month study into mobile porn and its influence on young people. However, he said that his findings failed to draw much attention.
After discovering 79 illegal WAP porn sites, he filed a complaint with the country's biggest networks, China Mobile, which resulted in the closure of 53 sites.
To prove his point about the dangers, Li cited a police report on Dec 14 of a 16-year-old boy in Sichuan province who allegedly raped and murdered a girl of 12 in September while attempting to recreate a scene from a porn film he watched on his mobile phone.
But Deng Xiquan, of the China Youth and Children's Research Association, said it was too easy to justify blocking WAP or online content by blaming porn or on-screen violence for juvenile offences.
The introduction of WAP technology has revolutionized the way people use mobile phones around the world, allowing them easy access to millions of websites at the touch of a button.
However, supervising the technology may prove the biggest challenge to those charged with leading China's war on porn.
