China shut down or blocked more than 140,000 mobile WAP sites offering pornography for mobile phone users in a five-month crackdown, an official said Monday.

Zhou Huilin, deputy director of the national office against pornographic and illegal publication, said the move had "clearly cleansed the Internet environment."

"In the next stage, we'll target serious criminal activity related to porn mobile WAP sites with servers overseas, as many such sites were moving their servers overseas to avoid supervision," he said.

China stepped up its war against Internet pornography in a five-month campaign, which was launched in August last year by nine government and Communist Party of China (CPC) departments, involving police, publicity, health, information technology, banking, and radio, film and television.

The crackdown was conducted in three phases, with particular attention placed on Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Anhui where many WAP sites are registered.

More than 150,000 items of lewd content had been deleted from or blocked on the Internet in Beijing during the campaign, and about 310,000 items had been deleted in coastal provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu, according to Zhou.

As part of China's latest efforts to curb porn, a judicial interpretation issued last month further clarified that production, replication, publication, sale and spread of obscene electronic information (video) targeted at minors aged under 14 via Internet or mobile WAP sites was a crime.

China's population of Internet users reached 384 million by the end of 2009, with 233 million, or 60.8 percent of the total users, going online by mobile phone, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.