Big Brother Law To Gag Chinese Bloggers

AKI | July 1 2005

Tough new Internet monitoring and surveillance laws will come into force in China on Friday as the country's Communist authorities seek to adapt censorship to the demands of the cyber-age. Earlier this month the government announced that from July, all Chinese residents who post their blog or Internet forums on the Web, will have to register them with the police. Those who fail to do so face fines of up to 120,000 dollars.

Registered sites will only be permitted to post "non-political" content or, as international media freedom watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) has denounced, material which toes the official government line.

China has equipped itself with the most sophisticated Internet control systems, filtering widely used foreign serach engines and web portals such as Yahoo and Google for content deemed undesirable by the authorities.

Some 600,000 blogs are estimated to be operated by Chinese Internet users, a situation that poses a challenge to Beijing's cyber-police. Besides the filter technology, the state has relied on a strict code that demands self-censorship by Internet service providers.

The new laws aim to block "all the information that could place the country in danger," from appearing on the screens of Chinese web surfers, and to protect "state secrets" according to a government statement, cited by RSF on Thursday.

In May, Chinese blog sites were inundated with official emails warning their owners to register or face being declared "illegal," RSF said. Some 75 percent of the blog owners are reported to have obeyed the order.

According to official figures, some 100 million Chinese nationals have access to the Internet, 30 million of whom use the fast broad band connections.