from www.digitaljournal.com - Beijing - In a recent announcement from China, the country revealed that it has shut down more than 60,000 pornographic websites and arrested 5,000 people in a yearlong campaign against lewd content.
According to Reuters, throughout 2010, Beijing has taken a hard-line stance against obscene material on the internet and cell phones that could be "threatening the emotional health of children."
While speaking with reporters about the crackdown, Wang Chen, the minister of the State Council Information Office, remarked, "By the end of November, we had inspected 1.8 million websites, and closed down more than 60,000 unsound websites that spread porn."
"We have made the internet environment much cleaner than before as there was a lot of pornography available," Wang continued.
In addition to shutting websites down, the government has also convicted several alleged distributors of smutty content; of the 4,965 suspects, 1,332 received "criminal punishment," with 58 of them sentenced to serve five or more years in jail.
To China, the crackdown is of vital importance and will continue to be in effect as long as obscene content still exists on the internet.
"This special operation to rectify online pornography and vulgar content has not come to an end -- this is a protracted war," says Wang.
While the Chinese government maintains that these measures are being taken to rid the internet of "unhealthy" content for the benefit of Chinese citizens, critics say that the central purpose of these actions is to prevent anti-Communist sentiments from manifesting, alleging that websites with political or user-generated content have been blocked.
Nevertheless, Chinese internet users have made the world wide web, which is regulated for them by the "Great Firewall of China," into an open forum of sorts, voicing their thoughts with a freedom rarely seen in the government-regulated Chinese media.
With 450 million users, China has the world's largest internet population.
