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Aside from shielding Internet users from political discussions the government considers deviant, China’s online censorship apparatus is meant to protect sensitive minds from pornography. But on Wednesday, it was nearly impossible to look at Chinese social media or news sites without catching a glimpse of a viral sex video.

While the popularity of such videos in the United States generally depends on the fame of the participants, neither the man nor the woman in the Beijing video was a celebrity, at least before the video began circulating. It was shot in a fitting room at a Uniqlo outlet in the Sanlitun neighborhood of Beijing, as an announcement to shoppers heard near the end of the minute-long clip makes clear. And so the video’s location made it more noteworthy than the participants themselves.

Uniqlo, the Japanese clothing store, is one of the key attractions in a well-known shopping center that also features an Apple Store and large Nike and Adidas outlets. Built on the former site of one of Beijing’s first Western-style bar districts (some of the bars are still in business across the street), Sanlitun Village, also known as Taikoo Li Sanlitun, looks like the sort of open-air shopping mall found in Southern California. Children play in the central fountain in summer, hawkers flog iPhone accessories, and crowds of young people wander the plazas and pose for pictures.

After the video scandal broke, the demand for (comparatively modest) selfies outside the Sanlitun Village Uniqlo intensified, with passers-by enlisted to help with the photography.

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“I saw that video,” said Wang Ruijia, 18, who was taking selfies outside the store with friends. “I think it’s meaningless. It’s just stupid. I can’t understand why they did that.”

It did, however, create a serious stir, Ms. Wang acknowledged. “All my friends are talking about it now,” she said.

Uniqlo has denied any involvement with the video, which some people had suggested was some sort of viral marketing effort. Inside the Sanlitun outlet on Thursday, employees were vigilant about preventing any photography whatsoever, and a security guard was posted outside the fitting rooms.

The Beijing police said Wednesday that they had opened an investigation into the case. The Cyberspace Administration of China said late Wednesday that it had arranged for talks with representatives of Sina and Tencent, two leading Chinese Internet companies, to discuss “conscientiously fulfilling their commercial responsibilities and actively cooperating with investigations launched by relevant departments” into the video.

Sina and Tencent operate Weibo and Weixin, respectively, which are China’s leading social media platforms. Both saw heavy sharing of the video and screenshots Wednesday, though a day later traffic had markedly declined, and many earlier posts were deleted. The government statement said it had called on Tencent and Sina to “raise their sense of social responsibility.”

Sina said that it became aware of the video shortly before midnight Tuesday and soon began removing copies. By Wednesday morning it had blocked 35 Weibo accounts, and by late afternoon it had responded to 11,850 complaints, the company said in a statement.

“Weibo has always been vigorous in handling pornographic content,” the statement said.

While making, copying, publishing or transmitting obscene material is illegal in China, censorship of pornography can be porous, said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei, a Chinese media and Internet research firm. “If it’s sex, people will find a way, maybe with a little help from people responsible for traffic at Internet companies,” he said.

As spoofs of the video and T-shirts celebrating it have emerged online, a commentary in Beijing News, a state-run newspaper in the Chinese capital, criticized the use of such material to drive traffic. “Websites and businesses that use this sort of rotten ‘Internet commerce’ disrupt the morality of commerce, and the criticism of their vulgarity will inevitably hurt their profits and their reputations,” it said.

Cherie Chan contributed research from Beijing.

Follow Austin Ramzy on Twitter at @austinramzy.