BEIJING — The pregnant woman slices through the crowd on a busy sidewalk.
"Yellow movie," she whispers to two passing men -- the Chinese slang for pornography. Holding her belly, she guides them to a grassy area and lifts a clump of sod to reveal several knockoff discs from the U.S. and Japan.
Her eyes darting, looking for police, she makes the sale: 20 yuan, or about $2.40, for two video compact discs. Then, as quickly as she appeared, the soon-to-be mom is gone.
In cities across China, women hustle porn on pedestrian overpasses and at tunnel entrances. Many are pregnant; others carry 1-year-olds, often rented for as little as a dollar a day. The babies are both props and shields: They enable buyers to immediately identify the sellers, and the women exploit a loophole in Chinese criminal law that allows for only a brief detainment of pregnant women or those with infants.
"Everyone knows the Chinese need to do something to take these children out of harm's way," said the director of a China-based children's rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But how do you tell the Chinese government anything?"
In recent years, the government has taken a comparatively lax enforcement approach to sexually explicit movies, magazines and Internet images, all of which are illegal here.
This summer, however, frustrated government officials took new steps to deal with the burgeoning pornography problem, launching a nationwide crackdown on the sale of so-called yellow discs and the operation of pornographic websites.
President Hu Jintao, calling for a people's war against such "contaminated material," pledged to severely punish pornography purveyors.
"This is China's new big problem," said a Beijing official familiar with the anti-porn crusade. "Many people consider pornography the nation's No. 1 social ill, even more so than gambling and drugs. It's become that serious."
The crusade is the newest tactic waged by an authoritarian government frustrated by an American Summer of Love-style sexual revolution that has swept across China.
Only a generation ago, writing a love letter was grounds for punishment. Now China's airwaves are awash with "sex talk" radio shows, and graphic sex novels such as "Breakup Dawn" and "Happiness That Lasts Half-Day Long" have become bestsellers.
