This Is Awkward: The Politics of a Chinese Orgy

Orgies are back in the news in Beijing, but this time it’s the Communist Party that has found itself in an uncomfortable position, and it is now praising the virtues of privacy. A leaked batch of photos swept across the Chinese internet this month, depicting a festive gathering of five, arrayed in various numerical combinations. Of more than a hundred photos, the ones that attracted the most attention were not the most acrobatic; they were the group portraits in which participants posed for the camera so clearly that it was not long before they were identified by Chinese Web users and discovered to include several government officials. Soon the group shots had been appended to portraits of the participants in their familiar poses—at official conferences, in tweeds, behind name plates—and the Internet swarmed. As the state-run Global Times put it, “it seems that Internet users do not want officials to be perceived as being akin to common mortals. They regularly show a great interest in burrowing away at government officials’ privacy.”