The number of Internet users in China is estimated to have exceeded 450 million this year as more people log onto the Web, government officials said Friday.
As of the end of November, 450 million people used the Internet, up 20.3 percent from a year earlier, said China's State Council Information Office. The figure is equivalent to 33.9 percent of the country's total population of more than 1.3 billion.
With the number of users rising, Wang Chen, head of the Information Office, said earlier that the Chinese government will make further efforts to put the Internet community in good order.
Wang said that China, like the rest of the world, is plagued by online pornography, hacking, viruses and online fraud.
The Chinese authorities launched a campaign against Web pornography in December 2009 and shut down more than 60,000 pornographic Web sites, arresting 4,965 violators by November this year.
Of the suspects, 1,332 people were sentenced, with 58 jailed for five years or longer, Wang added.
Under the country's policy of Internet censorship, some foreign Web sites are blocked in China, or have been in the past.
Most popular U.S. social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, are banned for Chinese users. The Chinese Internet police have clamped down on Internet buzz on Liu Xiaobo, a jailed Chinese dissident who won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.