Last month, Kotaku posted a job listing for a porn censor in China. Maybe you applied! Maybe you didn’t. But if you were curious as to what kind of people censor porn in China, here’s your chance to have a peek.
In an interview with China’s Hunan Television (via SCMP), 70 year-old Liu Xiaozhen talked about his job working at the Hunan provincial “eliminate pornography and illegal publications” office.
According to Liu, a national award in 2008 for writing about censoring porn, reports the South China Morning Post.
Last month, Liu and three colleagues had to go through seven hundred confiscated DVDs and classify them — in one week. The videos were classified as “pornographic”, “obscene”, and “others”. This classification helps the Chinese legal system determine what charges should be meted out.
“You have to watch even if you don’t want to watch,” Liu said in the report (via SCMP). “But when you’re in this job, you have to watch very closely, and once you’ve watched, you classify.”
To become a censor, the Hunan Television report says that one must be married and have gone through training. Porn spotting training, apparently.
“You have to watch it even if you don’t want to” [SCMP via ShanghaiIst]
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Comments
One response to “A Rare Look Inside China’s Porn Censors”
Probably not a dream job. I knew a guy who was a graphic designer, and straight out of the gate all he could pick up was dodgy logo-design gruntwork for a tiny no-name company who completely failed to pay superannuation and various other HR shortcuts.
He freelanced and did commissions for a bit, but it wasn’t really bringing home the bacon – then one day he gets a financially viable job doing magazine catalogues… which turned out to be a cover for porn sites. This was back in the day before streaming video took off, so the big spinner was photo galleries. A small home operation based around creating the web-site, buying content from artists, laying out and adding a charge gateway. My friend’s job was to design layouts, select photo shoots and ‘enhance’ the images. (Add more spunk.)
He said it was OK at first, but after a while how he viewed it started to change. Instead of noting the model/actresses names he was learning and appreciating the visual styles of the photographers and their favourite equipment. He had several cutting edge hard drives packed to the brim with porn.
He became… immune to porn. So remember kids. You may THINK working with porn to be a dream-job, but think of the long term consequences and remember: All things in moderation.