What more of a sign do you need that weblogs are a feisty new medium that has become disturbing to The Powers The Be in governments everywhere than what’s now going on in China — a crackdown on blogs:
The Chinese government has announced plans to police web forums, chat rooms and blogs alongside other websites.
Websites in China have long been required to be officially registered. The authorities are now determined that blogs should also be brought under state control.
Press advocacy group Reporters without Borders said the initiative would “enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively”.
Private bloggers must register the full identity of the person responsible for the sites, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) said. Commercial publishers and advertisers can face fines of up to one million yuan if they fail to register. All blogs and websites must be registered by 30 June.
Question: could some of the recent coverage by blogs in China about the anti-Japanese riots — and suggestions that the riots were at the very LEAST enabled by the Chinese government — have had something to do with it? The BBC story also adds these details:
“The internet has profited many people but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people’s spirits,” said a statement on the MII website, explaining why the new rules were necessary.
It has developed a system which will monitor sites in real time and search each web address for its registration number. Any that are not registered will be reported back to the Ministry, the statement said.
Blogs are often used in countries where freedom of speech is limited as a way of speaking out against the ruling power.
The new rules could be devastating for bloggers who do not toe the Chinese Communist party line, said Reporters Without Borders.
“Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist Party’s propaganda,” the organisation said.
“The authorities hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems,” it added.
Because, believe it or not, there is what is effectively the Great Firewall Of China:
Known as the Great Firewall, the filtering system used by the Chinese government is not entirely unbreachable; for every new restriction and technical door that it slams shut, the Chinese people find a hack, a workaround or an entirely new way of communicating.
According to official figures, about 75% of sites have already complied with the new procedure.
Lesson for bloggers everywhere: just as governments of all kinds may wish to scrutinize these uncontrollable (of the right and left) pesky blogs, bloggers need to scrutinize the government. All the more reason for bloggers to take a hard-line on any form of government regulation on their freedoms in the United States.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.