Websites in the country promoting and detailing methods of suicide are facing their own demise, authorities have warned.  

An official with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said on Thursday that punitive action will be taken against those who distribute online suicide guides or operate suicide websites that encourage people to kill themselves.

The MPS official, who asked not to be identified, said: "Criminal proceedings will be sought against those who break the law by spreading unhealthy information on the Internet."

From July to November last year, the MPS, together with the Ministry of Information Industry, the Ministry of Culture and the State Council, launched an initiative to clean up cyberspace, shutting down more than 1,400 pornographic websites.

But now the Chinese media are raising concerns over the potentially more dangerous phenomenon of suicide sites.

In early March, a distraught mother told a local newspaper in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, how she accidentally discovered her son surfing a suicide website in his room, the Xinmin Evening News reported.

A search in Chinese on Google using the keyword "suicide websites" yields more than 610,000 results; "suicide guides" turns up 110,000 results.

China's public security entities reportedly eradicated online suicide guides and websites in 2002, but there appears to have been a resurgence over the past two years.

"Suicide websites are turning many desperate people, especially youngsters who are hovering at the edge of death, onto a path from which there is no return," said Xia Xueluan, a sociologist with Peking University. 

It is "inhumane and immoral" to seduce others to end their lives through the Internet, Xia said, adding the authors who write the suicide guides are, to some degree, murderers.

So far, there have been no reports in China of anybody having followed the methods suggested on a suicide website.

(China Daily April 1, 2005)