Life for pornographers

last updated 8 January 2015

Beijing

Owners of pornographic Web sites could face life in prison, the Chinese government said this week. Under a new policy, the more a Web site is visited, the stiffer the penalty. A site that has been clicked on more than 250,000 times could bring its owner a life sentence. The measure is part of a crackdown that began earlier this summer, when more than 200 people were arrested and some 700 Web sites shut down. Tens of thousands of police officers have reportedly been assigned to trawl the Web. China has an estimated 100 million Internet users.