I read this piece over at MSNBC on Friday, but didn’t have time to properly blog it until today – apparently China has been using pornography (or, what they consider to be potentially salacious material, at any rate) as an excuse to bust heads amongst China’s uppity internet community. In some cases cracking down on porn is a show of strength designed to rattle anyone doing fishy things on the internet.

Aside from the obvious hypocrisy, charges of vulgarity often signal a coming persecution of political dissent. The current crackdown is no exception. Bullog.cn, an edgy Chinese blog-like platform that often irked the Chinese authorities by reporting on controversial events like protests against new chemical plants, was one openly political victim of the recent purges. Commenting on the current crackdown, Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese Internet at the University of Hong Kong, wrote on her blog that “historically in China … the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content than smut.”