Ask Lemmygrad

I love those threads about porn in China.

Western left: "Pornography is exploitative and wrong for numerous reasons"

China: "Ogay" bans it

Western left: "Nooo, not like that"

China: "Another day, another banger"

A not insignificant part of the cultural revolution was uplifting women from various subservient roles in society and supporting gender equality as they understood it. Part of that was banning pornography, prostitution, and various other exploitative practices that primarily subjugated and harmed women. It feels kind of old fashioned here in 2026.

Pornography should be illegal everywhere tbh.

Common PRC W.

A large reason for it I'd imagine is how deeply intertwined the porn industry tends to be with triads/gangs and other reactionary groups in the underbelly of society. The PRC spent decades dealing with the massive mess of corruption left behind by the RoC and have only really gotten things to stabilize in recent years, the PRC views anything remotely linked with corruption and internal instability as a huge no-no.

From what I seen China is really not that heavy handed against erotic stuff in practice as they are on paper, if anything lightly erotic stuff is all over the place in China. It's more of a strategy of making things inconvenient enough to keep the masses away from it rather then any real intent to arrest everyday people for looking at porn.

the cia had mao flashbanged with extremely graphic gay porn and he never fully recovered from it

The ban was put into place for primarily moral reasons alongside combating Triad sex trafficking operations, and no one particularly cares to challenge the law because porn is one of those ‘open secret’ activities that everyone consumes via VPNs.

I'd argue it's primarily because of how exploitative the adult industry is under capitalism, and since China still operates within a capitalist world despite being socialist, allowing it as it is right now may cause issues. To add onto this, China in a lot of places is still rather socially conservative, and currently, sexual norms are not a primary contradiction within China.

Better things to be doing

Yeah I don't really understand why pornography exists in the first place. Based upon a recent survey of people and cats in my house, nobody even views it.

afaik the industry is quite exploitative so maybe that’s part of it?

Above all, prostitution harms the national economy and hinders the further development of the productive forces. We know that we can only overcome chaos and improve industry if we harness the efforts and energies of the workers and if we organise the available labour power of both men and women in the most rational way. Down with the unproductive labour of housework and child-minding! Make way for work that is organised and productive and serves the work collective! These are the slogans we must take up.

And what, after all, is the professional prostitute? She is a person whose energy is not used for the collective; a person who lives off others, by taking from the rations of others. Can this sort of thing be allowed in a workers’ republic? No, it cannot. It cannot be allowed, because it reduces the reserves of energy and the number of working hands that are creating the national wealth and the general welfare, from the point of view of the national economy the professional prostitute is a labour deserter. For this reason we must ruthlessly oppose prostitution. In the interests of the economy we must start an immediate fight to reduce the number of prostitutes and eliminate prostitution in all its forms. - Alexandra Kollontai

It is also illegal in Turkey. Our govt's reasoning is masturbation and premarital sex are sinful and it lowers the birthrates.

PRC's reasons must be more coherent though, like the industry is inherently exploitative and lots of illegal stuff going on there.

Bcz sex commodification is, shocker, bad.

Pornography is just another aspect of the commodification of sex under capitalism,.like prositution, it contributes to the capitalist construct of transitory sex, either in the form of marrying people based on there wealth (most commonly) or well just good old fashioned prositution.

Within any developing socialist society the destruction of sex commodification should be considered a important task, at it reinforces capitalist mindsets within a local culture, as well as reinforcing sexist attitudes in the local culture to whichever gender is considered the "lesser" gender.

This prohibition on pornography is one sign out of a thousand for China's socialist nature, as obviously in a capitalist state capital wouldn't want for a avenue of wealth generation to be closed off.

Of course pornography also has bad mental effects and can cause addictions to develop, which is another reason for it's banning.

moral reasons mostly

Define "porn". I've seen plenty of people on Rednote boasting about consuming drawn or artificial porn that doesn't involve human exploitation. They were boasting about it in response to puritanical Americans.