Internet: April 2007 Archives

By Reuters | via CNN
April 23, 2007

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday launched a campaign to rid the country's sprawling Internet of "unhealthy" content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine, state television reported.

With Hu presiding, the Communist Party Politburo -- its 24-member inner council -- discussed cleaning up the Internet, state television reported. The meeting promised to place the often unruly medium more firmly under propaganda controls.

"Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance," said a summary of the meeting read on the news broadcast.

"Internet cultural units must conscientiously take on the responsibility of encouraging development of a system of core socialist values."

The meeting was far from the first time China has sought to rein in the Internet. In January, Hu made a similar call to "purify" it, and there have been many such calls before.

But the announcement indicated that Hu wants ever tighter controls as he braces for a series of political hurdles and seeks to govern a generation of young Chinese for whom Mao Zedong's socialist revolution is a hazy history lesson.

"Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere," the party meeting urged, calling for more Marxist education on the Internet.

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Reporters Without Borders | Reporters Sans Frontières
March 30, 2007

The blocking of access to the Observatoire International des Crises website (www.communication-sensible.com) within China since late February after it posted an article, entitled “Shanghai, mon amour,” (Shangaï, my love) warning companies about the risks of trading with China shows that Chinese online censorship is by no means limited to “subversive” political content, Reporters Without Borders said today.

“Internet filtering is not just a problem for political activists, it also affects those who do business with China,” the press freedom organisation said. “How do you assess an investment opportunity if no reliable information about social tension, corruption or local trade unions is available? This case of censorship, affecting a very specialised site with solely French-language content, shows the government attaches as much importance to the censorship of economic data as political content.”

The press freedom organisation added: “The free flow of information online is not only a human rights issue, it is essential to lasting economic growth and the creation of solid trade relations with other countries.”

The Observatoire International des Crises (OIC) is a French organisation that produces a magazine on crisis management methods for businesses. The article that prompted China’s censorship, written by Didier Heiderich, said: “The Middle Kingdom has managed to divert international investments for its benefit, obtain technologies without anything in return other that the promises arising from our own imagination, gag its dissidents - including those abroad - and ensnare the west in its golden clutches (...) Perhaps it is time to realise this before we are closed in the Chinese trap for good.”

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