15,000 porn sites shut down

More than 15,000 pornographic websites, of which 11,000 were operated through mobile phones, were shut down last year, the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) said yesterday.

Mao Xiamao, director of the GAPP department that fights illegal and banned publications, said that about 90 percent of pornographic websites in China use foreign servers, "mostly based in the United States".

Mao's department shut down another 136,000 non-registered websites and more than 1.5 million pieces of "bad information" were deleted from the Internet last year.