Beijing Internet authorities shutdown six pornographic websites in an effort to prevent their so-called 'negative' influence on society.

The six websites, including "www.ysdm.com" and "www.xf13.net", contained what was determined to be 'unhealthy content' and were shut down Friday according to relevant regulations, the newspaper Beijing News reported on Saturday.

Operators of two other websites were given a deadline to clean up the contents on their websites after an investigation, the paper said.

In early April, a proposal to operate 'civilized' Internet websites way won support from fourteen major websites in the city. The Internet authorities have also increased their supervision of Internet websites.

In recent years, the Internet industry in China has seen remarkable progress and now has more than 700,000 websites, with more than 25,000 being added each year. There are more than 100 million Internet users in the country.

In 2004, Chinese government kicked off a massive campaign to weed out pornography from the rapidly-growing Internet.

In 2005, 11 people were jailed for up to 12 years for running an obscene website in China's largest case of Internet pornography.

(Xinhua News Agency April 30, 2006)