"We should avoid unhealthy websites and be careful not to get addicted to online games and chat rooms", said the students of the 7th middle school of Chengdu, capital of southeast China's Sichuan Province, Tuesday in a letter to their fellow students.

The city has launched a crusade to guide its 100,000 middle school students to use the Internet in a responsible manner.

Use of the Internet should not involve searching for unwholesome material or becoming addicted to games or chat rooms --this is the consensus accepted by children, their parents and their teachers.

A local software company has offered a kind of green Internet use card for filtering out unhealthy information. The organizing committee of the event entrusted another company to develop software with the same function.

Statistics show that 60 percent of Internet users in the city are under 30, and many of them are middle school students, whose youth and lack of experience make them vulnerable to sinister information on the Internet, sources said.

(People's Daily 05/16/2001)