New restrictions on internet news content in China are aimed at controlling an increasingly independent society that is demanding more rights protections, reports and analysts said on Monday.
The new rules issued on Sunday by the State Council, China’s Cabinet, require internet operators to re-register their news sites and police their sites for content that can “endanger state security” and “social order”.
The rules are the latest in China’s efforts to keep “unhealthy content” like pornography and anti-government reports off the internet and the newest building block in what has come to be known as the “Great Firewall of China”.
China already requires all websites and all users of internet cafes to register before using the internet, while major websites have signed on to a code of conduct to keep unauthorised content off the web.
According to the Beijing News, the new rules are especially aimed at controlling China’s fledgling civil society and curbing thousands of protests that have erupted around the nation in recent years.
“The internet has been banned from inciting illegal protests,” the paper said in a front-page headline.
Social unrest over government corruption, land requisition policies, police brutality and a wide assortment of civil rights issues has increasingly been aired and disseminated on the internet.
According to the paper, which published excerpts of the new rules, the regulations are no different from provisional regulations issued in 2000, except for two new items aimed at controlling civil society.
“Internet news shall not include content that … incites illegal gatherings, associations, marches, demonstrations and crowds to harm social order,” one newly added item says.
“Internet news shall not include content that … aids illegal civil organisations to hold activities,” was the other.
Nicolas Becquelin, the Hong Kong-based director of Human Rights in China, said the new rules were aimed at making internet operators in China censor themselves and reflected the government’s concern with the technology.
“Basically the content of the regulations are already in the criminal law, state security law and other laws that already prevent any information that is not approved from being circulated,” said Becquelin.
“But the new regulations also tell us that the state is afraid of an increasingly burgeoning independent civil society using modern internet technology to organise.”
China has already jailed several journalists for posting anti-government and subversive content on the internet as a way of intimidating internet operators, he said.
Journalist Shi Tao was jailed for 10 years for “revealing state secrets,” by using his e-mail account to post on the internet an order barring Chinese media from marking the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Besides targeting civil society, the new rules also call for government propaganda bureaus to step up supervision over Internet news sites.
Chinese internet news providers expressed concerns over the new rules but refused to discuss them, apparently for fear of government retaliation.
“We have seen the regulation but so far it is not convenient to talk about this. We will operate in accordance with the regulations,” said Wang Yuechun, a content provider at the news centre of Sohu.com, one of China’s major websites.
Said an official at another major website NetEase.com, “Before there was a temporary provision, now the provision has become a formal regulation. We cannot comment on the new regulations at the moment.”
The government forecasts the country will have 120-million internet users by the end of 2005, a figure that would mark a growth of nearly 28% from 94-million at the end of 2004.
China’s online population has grown rapidly in recent years from just 620 000 in 1997, and it is now the world’s second largest internet market after the United States, according to the official Xinhua news agency. – AFP