Director of the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC) Li Jiaming said it would not be easy to shut down overseas sites. It is estimated that more than 60 percent of the adult Internet sites being viewed in China are hosted overseas and beyond the range of government controls. Though the site operators are often located in China, they are not easy to track down.
With more than 450,000 complaints about potentially illegal websites received by the CIIRC, half of those are related to pornography. The CIIRC has persuaded more than 4,000 domestic websites to ban links to the overseas porn sites, Li told local media.
Chinese Internet users pay to access the porn sites using Chinese online prepayment services similar to PayPal. The government is attempting to block sources of income to online content providers by asking China's online payment-system operators to review sales account applications more carefully.
Internet pornography is illegal in China and the announcement comes as part of an ongoing campaign by China’s Ministry of Public Security to censor Internet usage. Launched in April, the campaign uses elaborate filters and human monitoring to censor and control access to websites that the government deems sensitive or inappropriate.
It also comes on the heels of a Reuters article on China’s recent move to block access to the popular photo-hosting site Flickr.com after photos from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were found posted there.