US Edition As part of its latest campaign to weed out internet content that "harms public morality", the government announced the incentive scheme over the weekend.
However, the campaign appears to have encouraged internet users to search for pornography online.
Within 24 hours, a hotline at the Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre was flooded with more than 500 phone calls and 13,000 online responses, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
The censors are searching for any websites that contain obscene material or which advertise sexual products. The first person to report each site will receive between 1,000 yuan and 10,000 yuan after a committee had reviewed the tip-off.
The Chinese authorities have already been through several rounds blacking out online pornography. Earlier this year, Google was publicly sanctioned for not filtering out pornography from its search engine in China, and in the middle of November the government announced that it wanted to extend its censorship to any websites that can be accessed by mobile phones.
The government has, however, backed down from an earlier proposal to install censorship software, a programme called Green Dam, on every personal computer sold in the country.
Meanwhile, the China Business News newspaper reported that regulators in China have shut down hundreds of video-sharing websites in a bid to control content more closely. Several well-known websites were ordered to delete links to downloaded films or television series in the past week. One site, BTChina, said on its website that the State Administration of Video, Film and Television had commanded it to close because it had no license to provide audio or video content. The newspaper said 414 video-sharing websites had been shut so far this year. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are also all banned.