Ever since a high-profile CCTV report on prostitution in Dongguan, 3,033 people have been detained for prostitution-related crimes, of which 1,497 are described as profiteers or operators of prostitution-related businesses. The crackdown involves a total 1,121 cases in which 214 prostitution rings are said to have been busted.

Guangdong police have checked over 947,000 establishments in which 3,553 have been deemed illegal. Of these illegal establishments, 269 have been banned, 19 have had their certificates suspended, and 3,129 have closed.

READ: Prostitution Returns to Dongguan Under Protection of Local Police

As well, Guangdong police announced that 1,200 websites associated with prostitution have been shut down, and that one million QQ, WeChat, and Weibo accounts have been cancelled.

On Wednesday, WeChat announced they have shut down over 20 million WeChat accounts related to prostitution nationwide this year alone.

READ: Shenzhen Raid Captures Enough Prostitutes to Fill a Basketball Court

These announcements come as a group of legal experts allege convicted sex workers have been sent to labor camps for re-education, reports Radio Free Asia.

A letter signed by the group criticized the new “custody and education” system implemented in place of the controversial “re-education through labor” system abolished last year, saying there’s no difference between the two.

Under the new system, the critics allege a person can be incarcerated by police for up to two years without trial for involvement in the sex industry, whether as a sex worker or a client.

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Related stories:

• Dongguan Hotels Suffering, Occupancy Down 90% After Sex Crackdown
• Meet China’s Hugh Grant Sex Scandal Counterpart, Huang Haibo
• Mayor of Dongguan: “I Had No Idea Prostitution Was Such a Big Problem”
• NPC Member Latest Casualty of Dongguan Prostitution Crackdown
• Is It Time to Legalize Prostitution in China?
• Watch Prostitutes Get a Lesson in Using Momo, WeChat to Lure Clients

Photo: cnhubei

This was made publicly known after a university student surnamed Li was randomly clicking through the website in the hope of finding a job in the bureau. Little did he know when he clicked on a link to Huidong No. 2 People’s Hospital, one of the bureau’s subsidiary units, he hit the motherload: pictures of scantily-dressed women in racy positions, and Chinese ads for naked chatting and prostitution. This obscene content was planted in notable places on the page, according to descriptions from Nanfang Daily.

The porn site linked to the department’s website.

A random click onto any linked picture shown on the website leads you into something that’s even “more obscene to the eye,” according to the report. How obscene it is? We will leave that to your imagination. But it’s so obscene that Li believed that his computer had gotten infected with some kind of virus. Days later, the contents were still there, Li said.

Strangely enough, there was no reaction from the department in regards to anything abnormal about its website even after 15 days when Li first found the porn sites.

When contacted by a journalist about the “extra health services”, the bureau said they were completely in the dark about the situation and claimed the site was hacked. The bureau stated they had reported the matter to the local police.

Next time, don’t blame bureaucracy for slow service at the health bureau. Bureaucracy itself is hampered by health officials cowering behind their computer screens and watching…well you know what.

Home page and content page photo from TVS朱春宇

According to local television, last weekend a number of women were secretly photographed with iPhones at a swimming pool in Guangzhou. A women identified as Ah Zhu was swimming in the pool at The People’s Municipal Fitness Center in the city’s Yuexiu District around 7.30 in the evening when she saw three men near her with mobile phones. She thought it odd that they would have phones near a swimming pool, and made a mental note of the men’s appearances. The men all had non-local accents, she told 163 news.

One of the men, very tall, thin and thought to be in his twenties, sat by the pool playing with his phone, while the other two men would swim in the water with their iPhones, which had waterproof jackets. The men would periodically get together to look at each other’s screens, then laugh at what they saw.

Ah Zhu observed them for some time and noticed they would go under water to take photographs any time a female entered the pool, this included little girls and middle-aged women. She later told her boyfriend Ah Qiang who said that if he had been there, he would have started a fight. Concerned that the men might upload the photographs to a pornographic website, Qiang called for the health center to ban mobile phones from the pool area.

While the health center has yet to introduce a ban, according to lawyer Huang Zhiyong, it is a criminal offense to publish somebody’s picture on a pornographic website without their permission. In Huang’s opinion, the health center should take the necessary steps to protect the privacy of swimmers, and ensure such an offence isn’t committed again.