Beijing police arrest man for posting sex stories on his blog

A Chinese man was arrested for posting sexually explicit stories on his online Web journal in a nationwide crackdown on objectionable material circulating the Internet, state media said Friday.

While China stringently polices the Internet for obscene material and content that the ruling Communist Party finds politically threatening, the case was also unusual because it involved sexually explicit essays, not pictures.

Xinhua News Agency said the arrest was part of a campaign launched last month to clean up "decadent and backward ideological and cultural material" posted to the Web and spread through mobile text messages.

It said so far police have closed 1,450 Web sites and deleted more than 30,000 allegedly obscene messages.

The suspect - only identified by his surname Li - was a driver for an advertising company, reports said.

He posted the sexually explicit content to his "Hazy Night" blog to attract traffic to his site and boost advertising revenue promised by the host, PKsina.com.cn, the Beijing Morning Post reported.

Police in Beijing's university district arrested Li on Tuesday for allegedly spreading Internet pornography, Xinhua said.

People convicted of selling obscene content face jail terms between six months to three years, but it was not immediately clear if that would apply to Li because the material was freely available on his site, Xinhua said.

Beijing police did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment.

Li's "Hazy Night" blog had gotten nearly 100,000 visits between August 2006 and April this year, when police began to receive complaints about the site, Xinhua quoted a spokesman with Beijing Public Security Bureau as saying.

Though the site is now inaccessible, a version stored on Google.com showed that the blog contained a warning that said it was for readers over 18 only. The version listed dozens of Chinese language short stories about consensual sex between adults as well as rape, incest, pedophilia and masturbation.

Despite Chinese government controls and prohibitions, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers.