Column

Last week, a storm of cyclonic intensity raged on the Chinese-language internet after paparazzi photographs of Zhang Ziyi, one of the country’s best-known actresses, lounging on a Bermudan beach with her Israeli billionaire boyfriend made it online.

Some 80-plus photos of the couple, taken from pretty up-close, were posted on an English-language website overseas.

In many of these, the bikini-clad, 29-year-old Zhang, star of such popular films as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Memoirs of a Geisha, Hero and Rush Hour 2, was seen in comfortable, and occasionally intimate, repose with the man to whom she is affianced.

She’s seen topless in a few frames, and in a few others, her fiancé, while applying sunblock lotion on her bare back, subjects her posterior to some particularly clinical and tender attention.

But there was nothing distasteful about the pictures — except that they marked a perverse intrusion into the private space of a celebrated star who, for all her fame, is entitled to her quiet moments.

What triggered the internet storm, however, was the avalanche of comments on Chinese-language websites and bulletin board services, which represented a range of conflicting emotions.

At the first level, there were unreasoned outpourings of anguish that Zhang had somehow caused a nation of a billion-plus people to lose face by engaging in public display of amorous affection with a white-skinned man.

A few others accused Zhang of being a “gold digger” leveraging her “exotic Asian looks” to ensnare a rich white guy; the rant is doubly ridiculous because Zhang, who has won several international acting awards, has a personal net-worth running to millions of dollars. The few online voices that spoke up in defence of Zhang were, however, drowned out in the chorus of critical comments.

Anonymous internet comments by ill-informed and bilious posters are, of course, never truly representative of public opinion anywhere; but the Chinese internet space has traditionally proven itself to be rather more socially conservative than the flesh-and-blood universe of Chinese civil society.

And the reflexive response in defence of ‘racial purity’ in social relationships is increasingly becoming something of a recurring theme.

For instance, a couple of years ago, incensed Chinese netizens in Shanghai went so far as to launch a manhunt for a Western expatriate English tutor who posted a blog chronicling his sexual conquests with the city’s racy young girls.

The anonymous blogger’s borderline-pornographic postings, and his occasional criticism of the sexual limitations of Chinese men and of the ‘flaws’ in Chinese society and the polity, enraged a leading Shanghai academician to such an extent that he incited other “Chinese netizens and compatriots” to identify the “immoral foreigner” and “kick the foreign trash out of China”.

There were concerns then that Western expatriates in Shanghai could become targets of random attacks by angry netizens with an obsession for “racial fidelity” in Chinese women’s choice of sexual partners.

In contrast to this, on the streets of China’s cities and towns, a parallel universe thrives. A new kind of ‘Cultural Revolution’ is underway, characterised by an open and carefree savouring of sexual freedoms that has nothing in common with the social conservatism of the online world. And although it’s rather more in-your-face in the big cities — Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen — even small-town China sizzles with hormone-induced change.

Last year, for instance, Changchun — the Chinese city equivalent of Jaipur, say — momentarily gained a spot of notoriety when it was revealed that a local hospital was circulating advertisements for “ultrasound painless abortion”, and corrective surgeries for “hymen restoration” and “vagina tightening”.

The hospital administrator acknowledged that university students were their core customer group for these services. In rather more racy anecdotal accounts, expatriate managers in Chinese cities recount experiences of young women turning up for office appointment interviews without innerwear, and virtually advertising the lack thereof, and even suggesting an evening out to round off the interview.

Last fortnight, the Chinese government announced a sweeping crackdown on internet pornography and shut down 90 websites that were “polluting young minds”. For the first time, the authorities even pulled up internet biggies, including Google, Chinese search engine Baidu, and MSN China, for their failure to remove links to porn sites.

There is nothing uncommon about the crackdown on internet porn in China: the government launches a campaign against ‘harmful contents’ from time to time. This time, however, the campaign to ‘cleanse’ the internet masks an insidious attempt by the authorities to clamp down on information flows in response to the economic downturn and in anticipation of social unrest in a year that marks the anniversaries of several politically sensitive events in Chinese contemporary history.

In any case, as China’s youth celebrate their sexual freedoms in flesh and blood, a crackdown on online porn means little to them.