Six pornographic websites have been shutdown by Beijing Internet authorities in an effort to prevent their so-called 'negative' influence on society.

 

The six websites, including "www.ysdm.com" and "www.xf13.net", contained what was described as “unhealthy content” and were shutdown Friday in accordance with website regulations, the newspaper Beijing News reported on Saturday.

 

Operators of two other outlets were given a deadline to clean up the contents of their websites after an investigation, the paper said.

 

In early April a proposal to operate 'civilized' Internet websites won support from fourteen major providers in the city. The Internet authorities have also increased their supervision of websites.

 

In recent times the Internet industry in China has made remarkable progress and now has more than 700,000 websites with a further 25,000 being added each year. There are more than 100 million Internet users in the country.

 

In 2004 the Chinese government kicked off a massive campaign to weed out pornography from the rapidly-growing Internet.

 

In 2005, 11 people were jailed for up to 12 years for running an obscene website in China's largest case of Internet pornography to date.

 

(Xinhua News Agency April 30, 2006)