Taking its cue from Chongqing municipality, Henan province is setting up a karaoke "filter system" that sounds an alert when a song with vulgar content is played.

About half of the 110 major karaoke bars in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, have already been installed with the surveillance system, Wang Tianhong, an official with the provincial cultural department, was quoted by local media as saying yesterday.

The campaign is expected to be extended to the whole province next year.

Wang said the system will send out alerts if consumers sing songs containing obscenities. But there was no specific list of offending words to be tracked, he said.

Wang also clarified that the alert system would help the authorities delete songs with bad words and people will not be fined for singing such songs.

Earlier this week, more than 170 large karaoke bars in Chongqing were told to install an anti-pornography surveillance system to track songs with obscene content, as part of a government drive against pornography and organized crime.

At least 10 songs containing what authorities consider vulgar words, including Nightmare, Even the Pig Smiles, Conquer the World and Pleasant, were deleted during police raids on 11 karaoke bars last week.

The Chongqing Evening News reported that a music video of Conquer the World praised a disguised Chinese mainland cadre who wanted to take French women to Japan to film adult videos and urinate outside the entrance of the White House.