BEIJING — Chinese officials have launched an offensive designed to rid the Chinese Web of sites that offer pornography and “vulgarity.”During a teleconference Monday, seven Chinese government departments — the State Council Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Culture, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television, and the General Administration of Press and Publication — agreed to spend one month scouring the internet for offensive material, removing what they find and prosecuting the publishers.

According to Cai Mingzhao, vice director general for the State Council Information Office, Web-based vulgarity harms not only the physical and mental health of youth, but also the rights and interests of all Chinese. Therefore, the month-long “special action” focusing on the Web will take down sexual material, encourage self-discipline, enhance law enforcement, emphasize corporate responsibility and promote “the civilization of the internet.”

China has more than 253 million internet users, according to official news agency Xinhua.

Nineteen websites containing material deemed inappropriate immediately were named offenders, and more are expected to follow. The now-blacklisted sites are Google, Baidu, Sina.com, Sohu.com, QQ.com, NetEase.com, Chinaren.com, Zhongsou.com, Mop.com, OpenV.com, Vodone.com, Tianya.cn, Uuu9.com, Yesky.com, Hefei.cc, Tiexue.net, 131.com, SoGua.com and Kuaiche.com.

“The government will continue to expose, punish or even shut down those infamous Web sites that refuse to correct their wrongdoing,” Cai said during the teleconference, according to Xinhua. “Immediate action is needed to purify the Internet environment.”

In a report prepared ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, the U.S. State Department noted China had increased its efforts to “control and censor the Internet, and the government had tightened restrictions on freedom of speech and the domestic press,” as well as bloggers.

Conservative organizations in the U.S. say their own government should take a similar approach.

“China is to be commended for cracking down on Internet pornography,” Morality in Media President Robert Peters wrote in a message to American media Tuesday morning. “A small but influential minority of moral anarchists in the U.S. and abroad push the view that all pornography should be protected from government interference, but most people understand the difference between a discussion or debate about pornography (which is protected speech in the U.S. and should be in China) and the depiction of sex acts for the purpose of arousing viewers.”

Peters seems forever to be quoting the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Miller v. California to support his position: “[T]o equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with commercial exploitation of obscene material demeans the grand conception of the First Amendment and its high purposes in the historic struggle for freedom. It is a ‘misuse of the great guarantees of free speech and free press….’”

He also enjoys quoting a Pew Research Center study that concluded 70 percent of adult Americans believe “nude pictures and X-rated videos on the Internet” are harmful and a Harris Interactive study that found 73 percent of adults considered viewing online pornography “morally unacceptable.”

However, as even the Supreme Court has noted, to equate “obscenity” with “pornography” is itself an abuse of free speech. Obscenity is a legal term for material judged by a jury to be without “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value, regardless of whether the government or a majority of the people approve of the ideas these works represent.” Pornography is the broader category of all sexually explicit material.

“Viewing pornography has become an addiction for countless individuals of all ages,” Peters averred in his media memo. “The harms resulting include psychological damage to children, sexual exploitation of children, ruination of marriages, spread of sexually transmitted diseases, sexual assaults and sexual trafficking.”

The Chinese government might agree with him. So far, American courts have not.