Adam Minter, Columnist

China's Mystery Machete Man Sets Off a Porn Firestorm

June 21, 2012 at 10:05 PM UTC

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

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Mr. Gu, an unmarried pharmacist in north China’s Jilin province, never aspired to be a champion for privacy, much less porn. Yet, sometime this spring -- probably in March -- Mr. Gu, possessor of 95 downloaded pornographic films on his hard drive, uploaded the wrong photo to a popular Chinese bulletin board.

It was not titillating.