Lick Me I'm Cellular: China's raunchy sexual revolution

Lick Me I'm Cellular
Mark Morford - 9/24/03

The real engine of China's deliciously raunchy sexual revolution? Hint: It's vibrating in your pocket right now
(Associated Press)

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/09/22/financial1049EDT0051.DTL&nl=fix

BEIJING -- Liu Cheng, a 32-year-old banker from China's southern province of Fujian, was feeling lonely. So he got straight to the point in a personal advertisement he placed with Chinese Internet portal NetEase.com Inc.:

"Not looking for a long-term relationship; looking for a (one) night affair."

Just as in the U.S., the anonymity of the Internet has made sex and pornography more accessible to China's young adults. Leading the revolution are China's Nasdaq-listed Web-portal companies, Sohu.com Inc., Sina Corp. and NetEase, which, like America Online in the U.S., give users access to the Internet. But unlike in the U.S., China's portal companies also provide services, whether stock updates or matchmaking, through cellphones, because many more Chinese have cellphones than more-expensive computers.

The Chinese portals offer news and online games as well as a number of sexually titillating services, including explicit photos and articles, raunchy jokes, sexually explicit tabloid-style articles, and risque personal ads. They also offer suggestive recorded messages users can download to their cellphones to replace traditional rings, such as Sohu.com's honey-voiced "Throw away your cellphone and embrace me" message.

"People who signed up weren't interested in our weather reports," one portal executive says. Some users "have an interest in sex, so some of the products we promote have that content, too."

It has been a winning formula for the portal companies, making them some of the hottest stocks on the Nasdaq Stock Market in New York. For the quarter ended June 30, all three reported big jumps in revenue and profit, largely from booming growth in subscriptions. Their share prices also have rocketed; as of 4 p.m. Friday in Nasdaq trading, NetEase's American depositary receipts traded at $63.80, up from a 52-week low of $1.80.

Meanwhile, these portals are helping to transform China's once-Victorian sexual customs at warp speed. "Chinese youths have totally smashed the traditional view" on sex, says Wang Zhenyu, a marriage and family expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "Web sites and the portals are providing a catalyst to this dramatic change."

Sohu.com and Sina executives declined to comment on their companies' impact on China's sexual revolution or on their racy offerings. A NetEase executive says his company has restrictions against posting graphic sexual content, but if people use its sites to seek one-night stands or other liaisons, "we can't stop them."

Indeed, the portals, the main entree into the Internet for many Chinese, offer an outlet for the country's lonely and adventurous. In "Passion Commune," Sohu.com's electronic matchmaking site, a user who calls himself "Lost Boy" says he is in search of "young married women" and offers to please them in terms that leave little to the imagination. "Lonely after Marriage" says he is looking for a woman who feels the same in the western city of Lanzhou and leaves a number.

Such fare represents a tidal shift from the prim customs enforced by the Communist Party only a generation ago. When the country embarked on economic overhauls more than 20 years ago, women wore androgynous suits, no makeup and were rarely seen in public with a male companion. Today's Chinese woman is likely to sport a miniskirt and heels; couples can be seen kissing in public; and sexually explicit books and magazines abound.

Fan Ke, who recently posted an ad on NetEase's Same City Dating site under the name "One Night Stand-74," says he has met lots of friends online, and occasional sexual partners. "We don't have a lot of ways to meet new friends" says Mr. Fan, a 29-year-old account manager at a Beijing financial-services company.

Some users have formed serious relationships through such sites. Yang Yiwei, a 26-year-old human-resources executive in Beijing, and his girlfriend moved in together in February 2002, a year after they first made contact in a chat room run by Tencent.com, a site from Technology Ltd., a service provider based in the southern city of Shenzhen. Mr. Yang says his girlfriend then lived in another province but eventually the pair decided she would move to live with him in Beijing. But his parents "oppose every aspect of this -- meeting online, living together," Mr. Yang sighs. Her parents, he says, were dubious as well, but have since met him and are resigned to the arrangement.

The portals didn't always offer explicit services. Hong Kong's tom.com Inc. and NetEase led the way last year when they joined up with China-based independent Web sites, many porn-related, to attract more users, industry executives say. To gain access to the independent sites, users first had to register, for a fee, with their portal partners. Unlike the independent sites, the portals collect fees for their services through billing agreements with China's cellphone carriers; such billing rights are crucial to any Web site hoping to make a profit in China, where credit cards aren't widespread but cellphones are. After giving a cut to the carriers, the portals split their revenue with the third-party sites.

It is unclear how long the party will last. In mid-June, an independent Chinese Web site published articles alleging the portals were promoting pornography, triggering a sharp response from Chinese officialdom. Under pressure from regulators, China Mobile Communications Corp., the
country's big cellphone carrier, ordered China's main Internet service providers to cut links with the independent Web sites, industry executives say. The portals did so starting in mid-July.

China Mobile, meanwhile, has for three months suspended its billing agreements with the portals for services that don't use cellphones at all, such as paid e-mail, pending a cleanup of the industry. China Mobile could reinstate some of these billing arrangements later this year but might charge portals a higher fee, industry executives say. Without links to the sexy independent Web sites and an expected slowdown in some services, the portals could take a hit to their bottom lines. In fact, Sina and Sohu.com predicted only slight revenue growth for the third quarter.

Despite the crackdown, Hurst Lin, Sina's chief operating officer, maintains a rosy outlook. The company got in late on the business of third-party Web-site alliances, he says, and the popularity of his portal's Unusual Men-Women matchmaking site continues to grow, accounting for half of Sina's nonadvertising revenue. To get a feel for the competition, Mr. Lin confesses to masquerading as a swinging single and signing up for rival companies' dating services and cajoling Sina's engineers and secretaries to do the same.

"We ask (potential dates) to meet with us but they never do," he sighs. "It's all a fantasy thing."