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Lou Qinjian, vice minister of information industry, says China is the target of a campaign of computer infiltration and has proposed a raft of counter-measures including toughened censorship, new security bodies and commercial controls.

He did not address recent Western allegations of cyber-spying, but turned the accusations on their

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head by suggesting that China's computer networks were riddled with security holes that the US and other "hostile" powers were exploiting.

"The internet has become the main technological channel for external espionage activities against our core, vital departments," he writes in the magazine, Chinese Cadres Tribune.

"In recent years party, government and military organs and national defence scientific research units have had many major cases of loss, theft and leakage of secrets, and the damage to national interests has been massive and shocking.

"In the internet technology products exported by the United States there are 'back doors' planted to engage in technological infiltration and theft of secrets."

China has 140 million registered internet users, and Lou says they are being perverted by "degenerate and backward" content. He urges even stricter censorship than the government already imposes.