China closed 1250 porn sites in crackdown
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China has closed down 1,250 websites in its latest crackdown on online pornography but still faces an uphill task in regulating the unwieldy Internet for vulgar content, an official said Friday. Liu Zhengrong, deputy director of the Cabinet’s Internet Affairs Bureau, said authorities have also arrested 41 people in the month-long campaign that began Jan. 5. “We have made apparent achievements but it’s only for this phase,” Liu told reporters. “We still have a lot of work to do.” Earlier this month, authorities warned Google, Baidu, Sina and Sohu — China’s most heavily used sites — that they had to do more to block pornographic material from reaching Chinese users. The moves are part of a continuing government campaign against using the Internet to access pornography, which is banned in China.
However, it remains widely available off and on the Internet, where popular Web portals frequently show sexually explicit pictures and provide links to pornographic sites. China’s population of Internet users is expanding at explosive rates and has risen to 298 million after passing the United States last year to become the world’s largest. On average, there are 240,000 new Chinese users and 3,000 new sites daily, Liu said. “Our biggest challenge is that the Internet is still growing,” he said. “We are facing a long-term, complex and huge task.” While the current crackdown is focused on lewd material, it is part of a larger effort to control freedom of expression and root out material the leadership considers socially destabilizing, such as sites that criticize the Communist Party, promote democratic reform or advocate Taiwan independence. Authorities loosened some media and Internet controls during last year’s Beijing Olympics — gestures that were meant to show the international community that the games had brought greater freedom to the Chinese people.
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