Porn 'perverted young minds'
2007-04-13 12:23
Beijing - The Chinese government is launching a new crackdown on online pornography which it says has "perverted China's young minds", a state news agency said on Friday.
The Ministry of Public Security says the six-month campaign will target cyber strip shows and sexually explicit images, stories and audio and video clips, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
"The boom of pornographic content on the internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China's young minds," Zhang Xinfeng, a deputy public security minister, was quoted as saying on Thursday.
The campaign also will target illegal online lotteries and contraband trade, fraud and "content that spreads rumours and is of a slanderous nature", Zhang said at a news conference.
In China's biggest online porn case to date, a website operator, Chen Hui, was sentenced in November to life in prison. The government said Chen's website had more than nine million pornographic images and more than 600 000 registered users.
China has the world's second-biggest population of internet users after the United States, with 137 million people online.
The communist government encourages internet use for education and business but tries to block access to material considered obscene or subversive.
"The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China's cyberspace," Zhang said.
According to Xinhua, the Beijing Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents said 33.5% of its detainees were influenced by violent online games or erotic websites when they committed crimes such as robbery and rape.
- AP