BEIJING - China had more than 170,000 government microblogs by the end of last year, according to a report issued on Wednesday.

The annual report by the E-Government Research Center under the China Academy of Governance stated that the country has 176,714 government microblog accounts as of December 20, 2012, an increase of almost 2.5 times from the previous year.

Some 113,382 of these accounts are run by Communist Party of China committees, legislatures, governments, political advisors, Party disciplinary watchdogs as well as judicial and prosecutorial agencies and government-sponsored institutions.

The remaining 63,332 are kept by officials and staff members of such agencies, the report said.

It added that a great number of these accounts are run by agencies and individuals associated with the public security and police system, with the proportions respectively accounting for 37 percent of authorities' microblogs and 39 percent of the individual accounts.

The report is based on research of microblog accounts with weibo.com, t.qq.com, t.home.news.cn and t.people.com.cn, four major Chinese microblogging service providers.

The identities of operators of the targeted accounts are all verified by the service providers.

Among all the accounts run by individual officials, about 66 percent were opened by officials at grass-roots levels and only 1 percent are maintained by provincial or ministerial-level leaders.

The report said government microblogs have developed from simple outlets for disclosing information to become more integrated platforms for the government to communicate with the public and provide services.

It also suggested that authorities and officials should further improve the quality of these microblogs.