China may consider introducing a rating system to better regulate the country's booming online gaming industry in response to growing concerns over addiction among adolescents, said a senior administrator.

Yu Yongzhan, deputy director of the General Administration of Press and Publication, stressed that sufficient research is needed before taking moves to introduce a rating system.

"The rating system should be aimed at guiding online game developers and operators to offer more games suitable to adolescents," he told China Daily. "It should also play an important role in helping adolescents establish a healthy practice of playing online games and reduce their chances of getting addicted."

Yu made the comments on the sidelines of the ongoing annual session of the 10th National People's Congress (NPC).

As online games are spawning addiction among an increasing number of youth, national lawmakers have pushed hard for legislation to better regulate the industry.

Earlier media reports said there are now 14.3 million online game players in China, including 2.6 million young addicts.

Yu said strict censoring regulations have been put into place to ban the online games involving violence, murder and sex.

He, however, acknowledged that some role-playing games do raise the propensity to addiction among adolescents.

On December 27, 2004, Zhang Xiaoyi, a 13-year-old student in the northern city of Tianjin, jumped to his death from a 24-storey building after playing online games for 36 hours.

His parents said Zhang, who had begun playing online games since he was 11, had fantasized being one of the characters in his favourite American online game, Warcraft.

To curb the rising rates of addiction among youth, Yu's administration ordered the development of anti-addiction software for online games last year.

Online gaming has become one of the fastest-growing industries in China as statistics suggest the incomes of the industry reached 1.9 billion yuan (US$235 million) in 2004. Moreover, the figure is expected to rise to 5 billion yuan (US$619 million) this year. 

(China Daily March 14, 2006)