As part of its fight against pornography and illegal publications, China confiscated more than 9.8 million illegal publications and dealt with 5,500 cases in the first half of this year.

According to an Office of the Fight Against Pornography and Illegal Publications statement on Tuesday, the relevant authorities also deleted more than 27 million harmful and pornographic online posts, and shut down over 62,000 websites and applications for publishing vulgar content.

A total of 565 of the cases were criminal ones, according to the statement.

"Notable progress was made in cleaning up the cultural market, protecting juveniles from harmful information and establishing a long-term supervisory mechanism," the statement said.

One of the highlights was a joint operation by authorities, including the agencies of culture, public security, and industry and information technology, to clean up online services such as live streaming, short video clips, microblogs, WeChat accounts, e-commerce platforms, online games and digital literature.

In two major cases in central China's Hunan Province and east China's Zhejiang Province, 163 and 200 suspects were respectively detained for distributing pornography through webcasting software.

Efforts were also made to crack down on child pornography. In a joint operation in January, the authorities deleted more than 370,000 posts containing child pornography and required major websites to conduct internal inspections, leading to the removal of more than 1.3 million suspicious links.