Chinese police have closed 598 websites in a crackdown on pornography, but online gambling and fraud are growing, state media said on Friday.
The communist government encourages internet use for education and business but has launched repeated campaigns to stamp out material deemed obscene or subversive.
The latest crackdown, launched in March, led to 25 arrests, the China Daily Newspaper said, citing figures announced on Thursday by the Ministry of Public Security. That figure was low compared with more than 500 people arrested in a nationwide crackdown last year.
”Online obscene video chats, gambling and frauds have become serious crimes in recent years and are still rising,” the Xinhua News Agency cited Wu Heping, a ministry spokesperson, as saying.
One business targeted in the latest crackdown was ”online X-rated chat-rooms that offer nude shows through webcams” for a fee, the paper said.
The police ministry handled 14 000 cases of internet-related crime over the past year, the newspaper said, citing Zhao Shiyuan, director of the ministry’s web security department.
Police received more than 12 000 tips from the public, Zhao said.
China has the world’s second-largest population of internet users after the United States, with more than 100-million people online.
In the heaviest reported sentence for online obscenity, a 20-year-old website operator in eastern China was jailed in 2004 for 15 years for selling downloads of sexually oriented movies. – Sapa-AP