BEIJING - Security experts said China should establish a cross-ministry identity-management system in order to better protect privacy and fight high-technology crimes.

Wu Jing, an analyst from the China Academy of Telecommunication Research under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told China Daily that the country needs to merge the current systems, which are run by different ministries, in order to better crack down on issues such as online fraud and hackers.

"People in China now have to submit their information to different government agencies, telecom carriers and Internet service providers, which creates heavy duplication, and makes it hard to track high-technology crimes," said Wu.

She said a unified system will also help to prevent private information from being leaked.

Chinese government agencies, including the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, currently operate different identity-management systems that are unable to share information.

The systems run by telecom carriers and Internet service providers are also isolated and forbid the sharing of information.

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China's Ministry of Public Security said on Dec 1 that it arrested hundreds of alleged hackers and closed a number of hacker-training websites in a recent domestic crackdown on cyber attacks, but noted that such activity remains a severe problem in China.

The number of online fraud and spam messages has also increased significantly during the past few years, according to the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center.

Xiang Ligang, a professor at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said that rampant high-technology crime in China is largely due to the difficulties of tracking user identities on the Internet.

A report by the National People's Congress last year said that compromised personal Internet accounts are to blame for 70 percent of all information leaks.

However, Xiang also said that any efforts to track user information on the Internet, even for the purpose of fighting crime, raise great concerns for ordinary users about a possible violation of their privacy.

The Chinese government requires real-name registration for game users and mobile subscribers in China, but the regulations are not being well executed, Xiang added.