News
China Strips 140,000 Web Sites from Mobile Internet
(15 Mar 2010, BWCS Staff)China's 233 million mobile internet users have less to look at their phones than they used to, following recent moves to "clean up the internet" in China. Government officials announced today that over the last five months they have shut down no fewer than 140,000 mobile WAP sites offering pornography.
According to Zhou Huilin, deputy director of the national office against pornographic and illegal publication, the move has "clearly cleansed the Internet environment." He went on "in the next stage, we'll target serious criminal activity related to porn mobile WAP sites with servers overseas, as many such sites were moving their servers overseas to avoid supervision."
The campaign against adult services online was launched in August last year by nine government and Communist Party of China (CPC) departments, involving the media, health services and of course the police. Particular attention was lavished on Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Anhui where many of the WAP sites were registered. The Beijing government reports that over 150,000 items of lewd content have been deleted from or blocked on the Internet in the capital alone.
As part of China's latest efforts to curb porn, a judicial interpretation issued last month further clarified that production, replication, publication, sale and spread of obscene electronic information (video) targeted at minors aged under 14 via Internet or mobile WAP sites was a crime.
In January of this year search engine giant Google having threatened to move out of China and close its Chinese language websites, announced it would also delay the launch of its new mobile handsets in the country. Google, which is working hard to increase its presence in the mobile sector, has developed two mobile phones specially tailored for the Chinese market.
Back