A Chinese student who said his studies suffered after he discovered internet porn has been awarded $1,575 for helping the Government crack down on online sexual content.

The unidentified student from a college in northern Shanxi province reported 32 websites that contained pornography, winning a nationwide contest that encouraged web-surfers to hunt down porn, state media said.

In the first month of the effort nearly 62,000 websites were reported.

"In the past, when I was in middle school, I used to get grades that were good enough to enter a really good university," the Beijing News quoted the young man as saying.

"It is because of the influence of pornography on the internet that I was only able to go to junior college."

The winning student's porn-spotting ability had also won him monetary awards from local internet censors in the cities of Beijing and Tianjin, as well as Hebei and Hainan provinces.

China maintains strict censorship of the internet to curb what the Government deems to be unhealthy content including porn and violence.

Chinese authorities arrested more than 5,000 people in a crackdown on internet pornography in 2009.

-AFP