What is behind the 200 million items of harmful online information removed by the government? From The New York Times:
At first blush it sounds like quite an achievement: A marvelously named arm of the Chinese government, the National Office for Cleaning Up Pornography and Fighting Illegal Publications, reckons that it removed “more than 200 million items of harmful online information” from the Internet last year, including “more than 4,000 pornographic messages and 150 kinds of pornographic publications, cell phone novels and Internet games.””>an achievement: A marvelously named arm of the Chinese government, the National Office for Cleaning Up Pornography and Fighting Illegal Publications, reckons that it removed “more than 200 million items of harmful online information” from the Internet last year, including “more than 4,000 pornographic messages and 150 kinds of pornographic publications, cell phone novels and Internet games.”
That’s all the detail it offers, though; the report goes on to recite some statistics about the agency’s offline enforcement activities, seizing pornographic magazines and so on, and the number of criminal cases involving illegal publications that were investigated (more than 31,000) and prosecuted (667) in China in 2007. In short, the dispatch said, “The office said that the nationwide campaign launched last year against piracy, online pornography and illegal publications had achieved positive results.”
Hmm.
