Chinese Web Control

Published: Friday, June 10, 2005 Online-Casinos.com

CHINESE WEB CONTROL

Gambling one of the targets

The Australian reports this week that the general efforts of officialdom in China to control the Internet does not appear to be making too much headway.

Apparently government threats to close down unregistered websites have convinced only 430,000 webmasters to make themselves known to the Information Ministry - suggesting that most of the country's estimated 4 million web loggers, or bloggers, are choosing to stay out in the cold.

"There's a bit of a chill blowing through right now," said Duncan Clark, managing director of Beijing-based media consultancy BDA China. The campaign for registration is "...obviously an effort to impose control" on web activities, he said. Clark has moved his website offshore to avoid the regulators.

"Netizens" who use the web to question China's authoritarian rule quickly discover that the (Communist) Party's long arm reaches deep into cyberspace.

There are said to be some 40,000 "internet police" working to block access to sites the party doesn't like and cleanse chat rooms of subversive content, often within minutes of posting.

According to Reporters without Borders, at least 61 people are in Chinese jails for posting illegal messages or articles on the internet.

But Guo Liang, one of China's leading internet researchers, said the main targets of the drive to register websites were online gambling, pornography and some game sites.

"There is still space for individuals to go anonymously online," he said. "I think maybe the Government will do something on bloggers but up to now nothing has happened."

On the other hand, he points out, a 1997 regulation requiring registration of all Internet users is not enforced.

"It is a cat and mouse game. I think every government wants more control but the question is how, and whether local conditions will permit it."

The Chinese Web

* Internet users in China, January 2005: 94 million
* Growth on previous year: 18.8 per cent
* Broadband users: About 42.8million
* Officially registered sites (.cn suffix): 668,900
* Average use per week: 13.2 hours
* Increase in average weekly use over previous six months: 56 minutes
* Mobile phone users in 2004: 330 million
* Fixed line telephone subscribers: 310 million
* Short message service users: 237 million
* SMS sent: 250 billion