It may have been quickly censored, but a sex tape is the talk of China

By Jonathan Kaiman

May 26, 2016 1:05 PM PT

Reporting from Beijing — As sex videos go, this one was pretty tame: two minutes of shaky cell phone images showing little more than the nude back and shoulders of a moaning woman. In front of her, the skyscrapers of Shanghai’s Lujiazui financial district glittered through floor-to-ceiling windows. No celebrities; no frontal nudity; no fetishistic quirks.

Yet the video became a viral sensation this week in China, where pornography is strictly banned. The country’s censors have scrubbed it from the web — on Thursday, searches for “Lujiazui” on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, yielded nothing video-related.

But a flurry of chatter on popular chat apps, and even a surprising stock price fluctuation, suggest that the country’s public discourse moves in unusual ways that even the world’s most sophisticated censorship apparatus hasn’t quite been able to shut down.

The video appeared on social networking sites on Tuesday, and within a day, Web surfers had searched for it 280,000 times on Baidu, the country’s leading search engine. They identified the video’s setting as a room at a Four Seasons Hotel; they discovered that a sleek, white chair in the corner was manufactured by the Qumei Furniture Group, a company in Beijing.

On Wednesday, Qumei’s stock price soared by nearly 10%, perhaps buoyed by the publicity.

Then came the crackdown.

That day, police raided the Four Seasons hotel, according to the web portal Sohu. At 6:11 p.m., Sina issued a statement claiming to have purged the video from the network and shut down five accounts “which used the video as bait, inducing fans to follow them.”

“Sina Weibo has tracked the origin of the video and reported [details of the case] to the police,” it continued. “Weibo has always maintained great efforts to handle pornographic information. The website will deal with any third parties that are involved with erotic service transactions according to [regulations].”

By Thursday afternoon, “Lujiazui” and “Lujiazui video” were the top two censored items on the site, according to the censorship tracking website FreeWeibo.com.

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Yet the deletions only seemed to fan web users’ curiosity about the video. Who were the stars? Who put the clip online, and why?

On Wednesday night and Thursday, the video continued to circulate on WeChat, a chat app with nearly 700 million users. One Beijing-based finance worker said that the tape became a hot topic in one of his WeChat “friend circles,” a group of about 500 professionals. (He requested anonymity to avoid government reprisals.)

Speculation swirled about the identities of the people involved, and the motives of whoever posted the clip online, he said. Answers were not forthcoming. “That chair isn’t too bad,” one group member commented.

The incident recalls another sex tape that went viral in China — last summer, clips of a young couple having sex in a Beijing Uniqlo dressing room became an Internet sensation. Police arrested five people in connection with the incident, including the couple, but that didn’t dampen the hype. For weeks, young people descended from across the city — maybe even country — to snap selfies in front of the Japanese clothing chain.

“Sexual repression has been around in China for a very long time,” said Hu Xingdou, a social commentator and economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “When things open up just a bit, Chinese people’s curiosity becomes a dreadful monster.”

Yingzhi Yang and Nicole Liu in the Times’ Beijing bureau contributed to this report

Follow @JRKaiman on Twitter for news from China

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