Broadcast 'Porn' to the People in China, Go to Jail

JILLIN, China—He got a little more than a day in jail for each of the ten minutes of the banned movie he allowed to be broadcast earlier this week on the giant outdoor screen near the train station in the northern Chinese city of Jillin. The movie, The South China Morning Post reports, was probably a 2008 Hong Kong-produced version of the classic erotic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei, with the English title The Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks. The poor sap who allowed the film to be broadcast to the masses was a technician named Yuan, who had been hired to do maintenance work on the massive LED screen, and was living in the building to which the screen is affixed. "On Wednesday evening," the paper reported, "mistakenly believing the screen's computer to be disconnected, he began watching Xin Jin Ping Mei. He then received a phone call from Southern Advertising Company telling him that the film was being broadcast live to several hundred onlookers. Yuan promptly disconnected the computer and discarded the Xin Jin Ping Mei disc." Too late. According to another news site, " Now the screen operator has been sent to jail for 15 days and ordered to pay a fine of A$520." The only problem is, the movie isn't porn, but an erotic representation of the classic novel, containing no explicit sex. In this positive review of the film from 2009, GoldenPigsy refers to it as " cheesy soft-core erotica," but adds that while it may be smut, it is "good natured, impossibly earnest and surprisingly innocent smut." Not so for the Chinese authorities, though the two-week sentence is a far cry from the possible two years that Yuan could have received for disseminating the banned film, the original source material for which, while being perhaps the most pornographic novel ever written in Chinese, also, as AVN reported last year, offers readers a "Ulysses-like level of quotidian detail" into the "mores and manners during the Ming dynasty." The pieces of film that were broadcast the other day contained none of the explicitness found in the novel, however, which is at least partly why it was met with general indifference by regular people, according to the Morning Post. "Chinese netizens chuckled at photos and news reports of the incident, which went viral on Sina Weibo on the day of Yuan’s confession," it reported. "Some said Yuan was an uneducated 'day labourer," while more sympathetic posters felt that he was a 'temporary worker stuck doing overtime' who probably just wanted some privacy. Others felt that movies like Xin Jin Ping Mei should be shown on LED screens more often." Poor Yuan. Image: Courtesy of Weibo.