MCLC: orgy politics

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: orgy politics
***********************************************************

Source: The New Yorker (8/16/12):
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/08/the-politics-of-a-c
hinese-orgy.html

THIS IS AWKWARD: THE POLITICS OF A CHINESE ORGY
POSTED BY EVAN OSNOS

A couple of years ago, the Times ran a piece by Edward Wong with a
headline that stays with you: “18 ORGIES LATER, CHINESE SWINGER GETS
PRISON BED 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/world/asia/21china.html?_r=1&th&emc=th>
.” It was the profile of a computer-science professor named Ma Yaohai who
was in his early fifties, lived with his mother, and was best known by his
Internet handle: Roaring Virile Fire. To his chagrin, Roaring Virile Fire
had become a dissident of sorts when he was sentenced to three and a half
years in prison for joining clubs that promoted partner-swapping and group
sex. He had been convicted of the little-known offense that the Chinese
government calls “crowd licentiousness,” a relic of the days when the
government charged people with “hooliganism” for sex outside of marriage
and other flights of turpitude. The professor insisted that his efforts to
organize and participate in eighteen orgies was nobody’s business but his
own, as long as he was not causing a disturbance. “Privacy needs to be
protected,” his lawyer, Yao Yong’an, told the Times.

Orgies are back in the news in Beijing
<http://offbeatchina.com/group-sex-by-government-officials-or-distraction-f
rom-gu-kailai-trial-graphic-content>, but this time it’s the Communist
Party that has found itself in an uncomfortable position, and it is now
praising the virtues of privacy. A leaked batch of photos
<http://gawker.com/5935038/china-censors-totally-awesome-communist-official
s-orgy-picture-scandal?comment=51890972> swept across the Chinese internet
this month, depicting a festive gathering
<https://twitter.com/MissXQ/status/233464640867295233> of five, arrayed in
various numerical combinations. Of more than a hundred photos, the ones
that attracted the most attention were not the most acrobatic; they were
the group portraits in which participants posed for the camera so clearly
that it was not long before they were identified by Chinese Web users and
discovered to include several government officials. Soon the group shots
had been appended to portraits of the participants in their familiar
poses—at official conferences, in tweeds, behind name plates—and the
Internet swarmed. As the state-run Global Times put it
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/726725.shtml>, “it seems that Internet
users do not want officials to be perceived as being akin to common
mortals. They regularly show a great interest in burrowing away at
government officials’ privacy.”

It’s tough to spin an orgy. The local Party office in question first
claimed that 
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/08/www.weibo.com/2286
908003/ywmQIvqoc> the images had been photoshopped; then they dropped that
angle and said <http://weibo.com/2002435741/ywn55s0DB> they were, instead,
simply old pictures from elsewhere in China, unrelated to the county. But
that explanation ran aground when one of the men—identified in state press
reporters as Wang Yu, a deputy secretary of the Youth League Committee of
Hefei University in Anhui province—while insisting that “the two other men
are his friends, not government officials, conceded that “he regretted his
behavior.” (The photos, it seems, were plucked from the computer of one of
the participants after the machine was brought in for repair.) Another
Party organ was not as contrite. “NAKED GUY IS NOT OUR PARTY CHIEF: LOCAL
AUTHORITY <http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90882/7905233.html>” was the
headline in the Global Times after the Communist Party committee in
Lujiang county declared a case of mistaken identity in response to the
suggestion that a bespectacled participant bears an extraordinary
resemblance to Wang Minsheng, the local Party secretary. Wang said he had
been “slandered” most likely because he was investigating others for
corruption, and his office vowed
<http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90882/7905233.html> that revenge:
“Those behind the smear campaign will be held legally responsible.”

At bottom, the sex party is vexing for the Party because it highlights the
gap between the artifice of official solemnity and the unadorned reality
beneath, a gap that has become more pronounced in recent years as the Web
eats away at the monopoly on authority. The downfall of Bo Xilai is of
interest to the Chinese public not simply because it involves murder,
corruption, and betrayal but because it is unfolding noisily just offstage
from where the Party is desperately seeking to convey the sense that
everyone is proceeding according to plan. As the Global Timescommented of
the group shots, people “feel that this is but scratching the surface of
the lives of luxury and sin that many officials secretly enjoy. Such
activities are being pointed to as evidence for the decaying morality of
government officials.”

Until the hive moves on, government censors are seeing to tamp down the
discussion. The State Council Information Office has sent out an advisory
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/08/directives-from-the-ministry-of-truth
-officials-nude-photos/> to Chinese news and discussion portals: “All
websites must stop following and hyping the so-called ‘Lujiang Indecent
Photos Incident.’ Interactive platforms must quickly remove all related
photos.”