Cracking down on dissent in China

Increasingly worried about a sickly economy sowing social unrest, the Chinese government is tightening state control over the media. Its main aim appears to be to smother dissemination of politically sensitive discussions and information on the Internet.On January 5th authorities notified 19 popular domestic and foreign Internet companies — including Sina, Tencent, Baidu and Google — that a failure to expunge pornography from their mainland websites could lead to a shutdown. Though officials touted the move as a moral imperative, Chinese citizens often use the same websites to vent their grievances at the government on innumerable blogs and postings. In a highly publicised incident in 2007, for example, the existence of illegal brick factories employing kidnapped children came to light when desperate parents took their search to cyberspace on Tianya, which operates Internet forums. Hence, the call for stricter self-censorship of any content can easily gag all controversial topics online.
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