BEIJING (AP)—China has closed 1,600 Internet cafes and fined
operators a total of $12 million for letting children play violent
games and for other violations, the government said Saturday.
The announcement came amid a campaign launched in March to
reduce or eliminate sex and violence in Web sites, video games and
other material that Communist leaders consider harmful to public
morality.
Investigators have inspected 1.8 million Internet cafes looking
for unlicensed operations or those that let children play violent
games meant for adults, the Ministry of Culture said.
China encourages Internet use for education and business but
bans sexually oriented content on Chinese Web sites and tries to
block access to foreign sites deemed pornographic or subversive.
The country has the world's second-largest population of
Internet users after the United States, with 87 million people
online.
"Porn, gambling, violence and similar problems have adversely
affected the healthy development of the Internet in China," the
official Xinhua News Agency quoted Zhang Xinjian, a Culture
Ministry official, as saying.
In addition to those shut down permanently, some 18,000 Internet
cafes have been ordered to "stop operation for rectification,"
Zhang said.
The government said this month that 1,125 pornographic Web sites
had been shut down since July and 445 people had been arrested.
Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in eWEEK.
