The Depressing Lives Of China's Porn Inspectors

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Despite China's ongoing sexual revolution, pornography is still illegal. Under Chinese law, anyone found to be producing and distributing obscene material can get three years in jail.

The country requires many pornography censors to find and censor content considered obscene, and it's not always easy work.

70-year-old Liu Xiaozhen is one such censor, employed at Hunan province's "eliminate pornography and illegal publications" office. The office had to watch and classify 700 DVDs confiscated in April alone.

Over the weekend Liu granted a rare interview to ND News, describing the stresses and perils of his job.

The interview is in Chinese, but well worth watching even if you don't understand:

"You have to watch even if you don't want to watch," Liu says, according to the South China Morning Post. "But when you're in this job, you have to watch very closely, and once you've watched, you classify."

Recalling his first day, Liu said that it was "awkward, my face and ears turned red and my heart skipped a beat."

The requirements for the job don't seem high, the SCMP notes — candidates must be married and undergo training.

Recently, a job posting seeking a "chief pornography identifier" for internet company Anquan.org went viral, eventually reposted at least 125,000 times on the microblogging site Weibo. The position was said to pay 200,000 yuan ($32,280) a year.

While some observers dismissed the job posting as a publicity stunt, online companies do have their own censorship programs in place — one study found that pornography was "almost universally" censored on Weibo.