Apple Inc. is once again in the pages of the People's Daily, this time in an article listing a number of websites and app stores that have been investigated for providing pornographic content in China.

The Cupertino, Calif., company's appearance on the list (in Chinese), which mostly includes relatively obscure websites, has spurred concern on the Chinese Internet that this may represent the beginning of another campaign by the government against Apple. But Apple's most recent appearance in state media is markedly different from the March attacks that prompted an apology from Chief Executive Tim Cook.

A man talks on an Apple iPhone in Beijing on April 2, 2013. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The People's Daily article is not featured prominently in Wednesday's paper, nor does it make efforts to emphasize Apple, which is listed next to the names of other app stores singled out in the middle of the second paragraph of the article. According to Apple's terms of use, pornographic content is not allowed on its app store.

Nonetheless the mention does put Apple in an uncomfortable parallel with Google. Some analysts compared Apple's run-in with state media last month to Google's difficulties with China Central Television, which accused the company of spreading pornography in 2009. The accusations presaged deeper difficulties in China, including hacking attacks that led Google to move its operations to Hong Kong in 2010.

Apple in recent years has had other run-ins with the government over pornographic content on its sites.

The Chinese government is better known for its crackdowns on politically sensitive content, but it has also long sought to keep pornography off the web in China. To accomplish this quixotic task, it has launched repeated campaigns to block illicit material online, shuttered hundreds of websites and blog accounts, and even called Internet executives into industry-wide meetings to call for greater vigilance. Occasionally the Chinese government will use bans on pornography to censor politically sensitive content, according to analysts.

Following a March call for a new campaign against porn -- the most recent salvo in China's war on smut – a government regulator named Apple Inc.'s app store as a source of "obscene pornographic" content late last month and ordered it to remove the content, submit a report about the violation, and take measures to prevent future violations (in Chinese).

But it was a Wednesday article in the People's Daily that drew Chinese Internet users' speculation that the government was determined to push Apple out of China, its second largest market.

One, writing under the handle AGodot opined, "apologizing is not enough, you guys miscalculated, if [the government] wants you to go, it wants you to go…."

Nonetheless the People's Daily article was notably more subdued than a Xinhua piece that ran in late March which collected a series of grave complaints from Chinese about the pornographic e-books on Apple's store.

One person cited by the article worried that his child would get access to raunchy content while playing with the device.

But on Sina Corp. 's Weibo microblog Wednesday, others showed there is room for quite a bit of give and take on the issue in China. One user, Dao-Chu-Pao, quipped, "I sincerely ask [the People's Daily] about their Appstore porn search methods! It's too hard to find! How did the People's Daily find it?"

-- Paul Mozur, with contributions from Yang Jie

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