Two new Internet bans in China may offer insight into the communist regime's biggest fears.
One bars Internet news services from inciting "illegal" assemblies, marches and demonstrations; the other prohibits activities on behalf of "illegal" civil groups.
Together, the new rules appear to demonstrate the Chinese government's concerns about growing civil unrest -- and particularly over the role of technology in fostering protests and strikes, says Julien Pain, who heads the Internet Freedom desk at Reporters Without Borders in Paris.
Although the Chinese government encourages Internet use for education and business, it keeps a tight watch, blocking material it deems subversive or pornographic. Online dissidents who post items critical of the government, or those expressing opinions in chat rooms, are regularly arrested and charged under vaguely worded state security laws.
While the government has been successful at blocking specific Web sites, Pain said, "what is more difficult to censor are usually the forums and chat rooms." Add to that Web journals known as blogs, cell-phone text messaging and e-mail lists -- all potential outlets for unchecked political commentary.
Last week's update to Internet regulations issued in 2000 is vague, but human rights activists and scholars on China say the new rules define online news services more broadly. The state-run China Daily even cites SMS text messages, available to anyone with a mobile phone, as falling under the new umbrella.
"The old regs were focused more on news sites," said Jim Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Since then, "people have used SMS to organize themselves, to pass news around, to rally crowds of protesters."
The two new speech prohibitions appear directed at discouraging protests and restricting dissidents. The other nine -- including bans on rumors, pornography and defamatory statements online -- were largely lifted from the 2000 regulations.
Organized demonstrations have been on the rise in China, especially in the impoverished countryside, where anger has been growing over widespread graft, industrial pollution and seizures of land for development. The government says there were 74,000 major protests nationwide last year.
Popular forums
Authorities have clamped down on popular discussion forums, barring non-students from university chat rooms and banning anonymous postings. But newer outlets like text messaging are even more difficult to control.
Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at University of California, Berkeley, said cellphones were successfully used to organize anti-Japanese protests in April. Though protesters were supporting the government line, Xiao said, the use of technology served as a wake-up call to its potential threat to government control.
Bloggers, too, have given the government headaches.
Microsoft Corp took some heat from human rights activists for agreeing to incorporate software in its Chinese blog service to automatically reject "democracy," "human rights" and other words deemed taboo by the government.
"Before the Net came around, Xinhua [China's official news agency] was pretty much where you got the news," said Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet legal scholar affiliated with Oxford and Harvard universities. "This does seem to me an acknowledgment that news can be made by people, and they are struggling with that."
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