Gaysia (14 page)

Here was the surprising thing: most people in China were
in favour
of internet censorship. When surveyed, over 80 per cent of Chinese internet-using respondents said that they thought the internet should be managed or controlled in some way. Roughly the same number thought the government was the body that should be responsible for the task. When I spoke to university students and young translators, they thought that the current level of censorship was definitely too restrictive, but believed the internet had to be censored somehow. ‘If you live in a country without any censorship at all,' one young woman told me, ‘it would be chaos. Or just lots of porn.' Thinking about the internet back home, the logic was difficult to refute. Censorship in China might have been a problem, they said, but what would the internet be like without it? It would be wild and chaotic, overrun with smut, perversion and subversive ideas. When you let people do whatever they wanted, what did you get? Anarchy.

So in China, the internet operated in a parallel universe. Running Google searches inside the country for China's taboo ‘Three Ts'– Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan – yielded completely different results than would the same search outside the country. When I typed ‘Tiananmen' into Google's image search, it was as though those iconic images – bloodshed, protesters, tanks – didn't exist. I just got touristy images of the square as it
looked now. YouTube was blacklisted, but hey, there was no need to worry when you could watch clips on
Youko
. And sure, Facebook was banned, but there wasn't any need to get upset: Chinese language social-networking site
RenRen
was everywhere. It didn't matter that MSN was blocked when everyone had their personal
QQ
account. For every website that was cut off, there was a government-approved Chinese version that was often just as good and, in some cases, arguably better.

Recently, though, internet censorship had become especially intense. A few months before, the government had silently geared up for the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre by vacuuming up online references to it before they reached Chinese computer monitors. Resolved and ready, the network of internet censors embarked on a vast cleansing campaign, blocking access to major sites like Twitter, Flickr and Bing, and news sites like BBC, CNN and the
New York Times
. Facebook and Wikipedia had already been blacklisted, and now Hotmail mysteriously disappeared overnight too. Knowing all this, I signed up for a VPN – a virtual private network that allowed me access to banned sites for a fee – in a spirit of adolescent resentment:
Why did the Chinese government hate the internet so much? What exactly was their problem?

Around the same time, the government's State Council Information Office released its first ever white paper on the internet, officially outlining the nation's attitude to online connectivity. On first read, it seemed that I (and most of the Western media) had been mistaken. The Chinese government didn't hate the internet at all. In fact, the internet, the white paper announced, in vaguely Buddhist tones, was ‘the crystallisation of human wisdom'. The paper also assured people that the Chinese government would ‘unswervingly safeguard the freedom
of speech on the Internet enjoyed by Chinese citizens'.

Reading that made me disorientated. Wasn't this the same government that operated 24-hour surveillance systems and enforced filters to sift out activism and dissent? I was confused. It didn't take long for the white paper to return to familiar territory, though. Soon, the paper started to focus on issues like ‘effectively protecting Internet security', ‘protecting state security' and how the Chinese government refused to tolerate anything that would subvert state power, jeopardise national unification, damage state honour and interests, instigate ethnic hatred or discrimination, jeopardise ethnic unity or state religious policy, propagate heretical or superstitious ideas – the list went on and on. The section explaining what was and wasn't allowed went on for pages and pages, too. But there was nothing about gay and lesbian content. At least not explicitly.

Still, everyone was careful. Young gay men told me that every time there was a huge internet crackdown, dozens of popular gay websites would disappear without a trace. No one knew whether it was the gay stuff that made the site a target, though. Gay internet porn – like all porn – was technically banned in China, but sites still existed; they were just well hidden and required membership. You needed to know the rules, but you also needed to know what you were looking
at
, because these websites didn't look like gay porn sites at all. Instead, an innocuous homepage was the first step in a long obstacle course.

If you were accepted, you had to become an active member in the discussion forum. By posting the required (and secret) number of messages in the forums, you scored points on your profile. Once you got enough points, the site unlocked, and you could suddenly gain access to the gold: videos of dudes
having sex with each other. This arduous process was the price you had to pay without a VPN.

It was a complicated system, but perfect for getting around China's censorship infrastructure. If you were a government-employed censor, you wouldn't have time to leave messages in the forums. You definitely wouldn't be aware of a points system. The ministry's automated bots would never find these websites either, since there were no keywords or images to scan, filter out and destroy.

When I met Jeff – a well-groomed 29-year-old IT specialist – he had just launched
Feizan
, a kind of Chinese-language version of Facebook that catered exclusively to gay men. In its first half-year
Feizan
had already racked up an average of 1000 new members each month. Jeff and his friends looked like friendly members of a high school AV club. Allen – a 23-year-old online games designer, dressed in skatey clothes – wasn't openly gay with his family, but regularly organised social activities through
Feizan
, like movie and reading groups. Suan, a bespectacled string-bean of a 27-year-old, worked full-time for an internet company and helped Jeff maintain the website. Over dinner, Jeff recalled how he had come up with the idea of
Feizan
during a holiday in Thailand.

‘I'd log in to some gay sites overseas and found they were very professional and commercial,' Jeff said in Mandarin. ‘When I saw the sites in China, most of them were out of date and not professional. I wanted to make a site that was professional and represented the real life of gays. Because I have some gay friends – some couples – that have been together for a very long time. Some are musicians, lawyers, architects, and they are very “colourful”. Sex is not the entire life of gays. They want to communicate with each other too.'

Nearby, a sloppy-looking middle-aged man with a massive gut eavesdropped on the conversation, pricking up his ears when he heard the word ‘sex' come up. Whenever I turned to him, his eyes darted to the ceiling.

When he wasn't working full-time, Jeff spent most of his waking hours maintaining
Feizan
. Even at work, he'd constantly maintain the website in the background and would keep going until past midnight. This constant monitoring was one of the most important aspects of his work with
Feizan
. If he slipped up on any ‘rules' – rules that weren't exactly clear – the entire site could disappear without any warning. Everyone in China's queer community knew that LGBT websites regularly disappeared without any explanation from Chinese censors. Jeff hosted
Feizan
on foreign servers in Kuala Lumpur, a decision that had its pros and cons. On one hand, it meant Chinese censors couldn't ever take down the site entirely and it could always be accessed from overseas. On the other, running a Chinese website without a government-issued licence risked having the government find it and block it off on the grounds that it wasn't properly registered.

‘I actually
want
to register the site with the government,' Jeff explained. ‘I want the licence. Because if you don't have a licence, the government can easily block you by using the excuse: “You're not registered, so you're illegal.”'

‘Do you think the government has anything against gay websites, though?'

Jeff shook his head. ‘No,' he said.

Technically, Jeff was right. For the Chinese Communist Party, homosexuality fell under what was termed ‘the three nos': no support, no prohibition and no promotion. Its official stance on homosexuality was supposed to be completely neutral.
Yet some webmasters argued that homosexual content existed in a grey zone of acceptability. In 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had installed filtering software on all new PCs sold on the mainland, which ended up blocking any references to homosexuality altogether, including non-pornographic sites. It might have been a bug, though. This was the same filter that infamously blocked photos of pigs from web browsers when the software mistook pig skin for naked human skin.

So rather than waiting to be taken offline, Jeff did what all Chinese webmasters did: he self-censored vigorously. Internet commentators often argued most of China's censorship didn't come from the central government agency, but from the web moderators themselves, fearful of being shut down. As Suan and Allen passed a large bottle of Sprite to share around the table, Jeff showed me how he moderated
Feizan
remotely from his iPhone.

‘I'm like the government,' he said, laughing. He scrolled through the website's back-end and showed me how it worked. Every time users uploaded new photos, Jeff manually scanned through them to see whether they violated
Feizan
's user policies and China's anti-pornography laws. Naked photos were an obvious no-no. Jeff tapped and flicked through some photos until he found something that made him chuckle. It was a photo someone had tried to add to his
Feizan
profile. When Jeff passed over his phone, I barely registered what I was seeing before the pixels came together –

(‘Oh, Christ.')

– to form an extreme close-up of a young man bent over in a red jockstrap, pulling his arse cheeks apart to reveal a tightly knotted purple anus. It was one angry-looking arsehole. For a
microsecond, my female translator caught a glimpse of the photo, then darted her face back to me with big bug eyes, suppressing a shocked laugh. It's difficult to get an eyeful of a stranger's anus at the best of times, but it was worse when you were trying to eat.

‘What would happen if you
didn't
take these photos down?' I asked.

‘Well, there are two kinds of trouble. First, if I don't self-censor, then maybe it will break the Chinese wall,' he said, referring to China's censorship firewall. ‘Second is that it might become something
I
don't want. I want the site to
not
be like that.'

‘But you already have 5000 users and the website's only getting bigger. How will you keep monitoring this stuff?'

‘Actually,' Jeff said, grinning as he showed the jockstrap photo to Allen and Suan, ‘people who do this are not very common to see on
Feizan
.'

The bloated man in the singlet next to us tried to sneak a look at Jeff's iPhone too, but before he could, Jeff fished it back from Allen and Suan and removed the picture with a single tap. For the time being,
Feizan
had slipped under the radar. It hadn't crossed any lines, as far as Jeff could tell. But in its five months of existence, it had already managed to stir up some controversy, at least among its users. In its early days, it had asked intensely personal questions during the registration process, stuff you'd expect from gay dating and cruising websites but not a social site like Facebook: ‘Are you circumcised? Are you a top or a bottom?' Both of those questions were gone now.

‘We didn't want to send the users a message that
Feizan
was only for people to find boyfriends. But for a while, we had some questions that weren't quite …
right
. For example, when you registered, you were asked whether you were more like a “guy”,
or more like a “girl”, but it's the wrong question. We're
gay
. You cannot look at gay people from a straight person's perspective.'

Still, the most howlingly controversial question remained on
Feizan
's registration page: ‘Do you plan to get married?' And Jeff didn't mean married to someone of the same sex. That wasn't legal in China. Rather, the question was asking you:
As a gay man, do you plan to get married to a woman?

‘Why did you put that question up there?' I asked.

‘It's a fun and, well, provocative question,' Jeff said. ‘I think most gay people in China feel they have to get married and have no other choice. People around me – my gay friends – are either already married to women or are concerned with the issue of getting married.'

It took me a moment to process what Jeff was saying.

‘Wait: so out of
Feizan
's 5000 users now, what option are they choosing with the marriage question?'

‘Well,
I've
ticked “No,”' Jeff said. ‘Most people will choose
not sure
.'

There was also an option you could check called ‘fake marriage', which meant finding a lesbian for a sham marriage, an increasingly popular practice. On paper, it made sense. Gays and lesbians needed exactly the same thing: the freedom to pursue relationships with same-sex partners while proving to their parents they were fulfilling their filial duties.