中国媒体博克

The campaign against “vulgar” internet content is in full swing in China, and the timing couldn’t have come at a more interesting moment.

For one thing, the internet is abuzz with postings and photos of young Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi cavorting on a beach in the Caribbean with her fiancé. (Sorry, I’ll offer no links, just the photo you see of her here.) China Daily this morning calls the hubbub over the photos “an instant online carnival of voyeurism.”

Zhang, who was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was voted China’s most beautiful actress last month.

So just as some Chinese internet portals are apologizing for their “lewd” content, China is broadening the crackdown to include some U.S. companies, like MSN, operating in China. The crackdown has led to suggestions the anti-porn campaign is a cover for a broader crackdown on web companies. Indeed, among the platforms shut down today is Bullog.cn, the most influential liberal blog platform in China. The site hosts blogs of many pro-democracy intellectuals.

 But mostly, the crackdown seems targeted at domestic portals that seem to push the envelope in trying to get eyeballs.

As China Daily notes today in a column by Raymond Zhou: “Most portal sites in China look like a high school boy’s fantasy room, with half-naked women in all kinds of postures.”

Even the state media gets involved. One wag a few years ago used to call Xinhua, the state news agency, “Skin-hua” for its propensity to put cheesecake photos on its website.

The most interesting comment I saw about the crackdown, though, is on this website which interviewed Kaiser Kuo, the digital media maven at Ogilvy China. Here’s an excerpt of what he said:

“I don’t think it has a thing to do with dissent: It’s just what it is, a crackdown on porn. They targeted some of the biggest web properties in China (Sina, Sohu, Tencent, Netease) as well as many other smaller sites, and they’re just trying to get rid of porn, which is still pretty pervasive on the Chinese internet despite many similar crackdowns in years past. . . . Second-guessing the motivations of the Chinese state when it comes to internet policies reminds me of what Freud said. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”