How to Serve The People: With a Side of Hot PLA Sex

It's a little harder to get your work banned in China these days, but bestselling author Yan Lianke has managed to provoke the censors with some sex-charged subversion. Asia Times reports on the first fiction to be banned in China for years:

Serve the People, which was penned by a former colonel in the army, undermines the very core of Hu's mantra. It paints a debauched image of the Chinese PLA where the lofty Communist Party goal of "serving the masses" is carried out through sex and gaining military honors achieved by performing sexual favors for the bored and lonely wives of the upper echelons….A wooden sign in the kitchen reading "serve the people" becomes a coded signal for Wu that his services are required in the bedroom.

Last year, Yan won a goverment-sponsored award for a novel in which a group of disabled villagers go on tour and perform freak stunts to raise money to buy Lenin's remains.

Comments

[mediageek]

So, does anyone think there's a niche market over here for military-flavored commie fetishism?

[Stevo Darkly]

Only for Che revolutionary T-shirts.

Otherwise, the niche for military-flavored fetishism is pretty much all Nazi-flavored. Maybe a little Galactic Empire (Star Wars).

[mediageek]

Funny that you mention the Che t-shirts. I was once browsing through The Sharper Image store at the Galleria in St. Louis whereupon (is that even a word?) I spied a bespectecled dork wearing a Che t-shirt emblazoned with the caption "Cool like Che." In retrospect, I wish this had happened in the age of the cell phone camera.

The image of a dork in a Che t-shirt browsing the overpriced digital, web-enabled nose-hair trimmers at The Sharper Image is just, well, delightfully ironic.

[JD]

mediageek: You know there is! Look up the 1974 movie "The Night Porter" (Il Portiere di Notte). Also, I hear that there is a persistent demand for Nazi-themed porn from Jewish customers. Not to say that that's at all common, but it's there. The Commies are not popular icons of evil as are the Nazis, but OTOH, with the Chicoms you get to combine your Asian and authoritarian fetishes...

[Stevo Darkly]

Interesting, JD. Huh, just goes to show how little I know about military-themed fetishistic porn!