Chinese Bloggers Forced to Register with Government

SHANGHAI, Wednesday, June 8 – In its latest measure to tighten policing
of the Internet, China has begun requiring bloggers and owners of personal
Web sites to register with the government or be forced offline.

The new regulations, announced in March, took effect this week, with a
warning on the Web site of the Information Ministry that the sites of those
who failed to comply would be shut down.

The measures come against the backdrop of explosive growth of Internet
use in China, and the development of Web logs and personal sites as alternative
sources of news, as in many other countries.

The new measures against personal Internet activity come after months
of increasingly restrictive controls of Internet usage at other levels,
whether through heavy investment in technologies that allow the government
to monitor and censor use or through tightened rules governing Internet
cafes and Web servers.

In March, for example, bulletin boards operated by the country’s most
prominent universities were blocked to off-campus Internet users as part
of what was called a campaign to strengthen ideological education of
college students.

Users of Internet cafes must also now produce identification and are
issued user numbers, which make it easy to follow the activities of individuals.
Web administrators at popular online services have also been warned that
they will be held responsible for politically offensive communications,
thereby enlisting them in the policing efforts. It is now common for
administrators to remove from their servers any messages they deem politically
sensitive.

Is it possible, in a nation the size of China, to control access to
and use of a technology as ubiquitous as the internet? While this question
is still up in the air, it has become clear that the Chinese aim to try.
The thinking here is that they will be superficially
successful, for
a time, among the mainstream of Chinese users, but that on the fringes,
among the techo-saavy elite and those with foreign ties, the virtual
dike will leak. Eventually, as pressure for change increases, the
cracks will widen, and when an eventual viable challenge to the Chinese
Communist Party emerges, cyberspace and the blogosphere will constitute
its first patch of liberated territory.

Read the Berkman
Center study on Chinese government efforts to control
the internet.

article from the New York Times