Snow and the Chinese censor's pen

Sex and snow do not appear to have much in common. However, look to Chinese ingenuity for clues.

Beijing’s skies are polluted and its roads congested. The air is filled with the rumble of drills and picks and cranes from countless building sites. But a snowfall can blanket the urban greyscape with white and seems to muffle all sound. Cars disappear from the roads. The Forbidden City where the emperors lived becomes a magical winter wonderland.

The city’s 15 million or so residents enjoyed just such a treat today. It is rare. The north China deep freeze seems to drag on for months although snow falls maybe just once or twice in the season.

It may seem odd to be writing about the weather from a country where change of every kind is roaring ahead at such a rapid pace. But a peek at some photographs of Beijing in the snow offers a revealing glimpse of a much hotter topic: the Internet in China. And that's where the sex part comes in.

China’s busy censors have been making headlines as they scurry around in cyberspace, prying out and closing down sites carrying content deemed to be harmful to the Chinese people. Their intolerance of any points of view at odds with that of the Communist Party is well-known. A more recent development has been the government’s success in ensuring foreign Internet service providers, such as Yahoo and Microsoft, join their Chinese counterparts in banning words that the Party considers dangerously subversive.

Government officials say their aim is to protect young people from the harmful influences exerted by such evils as online gambling or by surfing sites showing naked ladies. So a search for gaming and pornography sites as well as for such topics as “democracy”, “Taiwan independence” and “Tibetan human rights” quickly runs into the legendary Great Firewall of China.

But users of China’s Internet who feel in need of a little light relief, and who lack the time or the opportunity to head down to the Forbidden City to see the snow, can click here on the website of the official Xinhua news agency for a surprisingly wide range of scenic photographs that seem to have escaped the censor's pen.

English-speaking visitors often refer to it familiarly as sinhua.