China Moves to Regulate Web Loggers

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MADELEINE BRAND, host:

This is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand.

In China, new regulations on blogging this week. Writers of blogs, those online Weblogs, and other owners of personal Web sites will now have to register with the government. NPR's Rob Gifford joins us from Beijing.

Hi, Rob.

ROB GIFFORD reporting:

Hi, Madeleine.

BRAND: Well, first of all, Weblogs in China? That seems a little odd.

GIFFORD: Well, there's lots of Weblogs in China. I mean, the Chinese, the youth of the cities, they want to keep up with the times. There's about half a million, between half a million and three-quarters of a million blogs here in China. Those people are taken from the approximately 90 to a hundred million people who are online. And people are just--you know, urban life in China is increasingly like urban life in the West, and people want to sort of chat and write about things and about movies and about things that they think, and Weblogging is how they do it.

BRAND: And so is the Chinese government afraid that these people are going to foment rebellion with their Weblogs?

GIFFORD: Well, that's why these controls have been imposed, but I have to say, you know, most of the people who are on the Net here, especially those who are blogging, like most of the people in the West, they're not online in order to get political and to foment revolution. They're online to have fun or maybe find a better job or find a girlfriend or all the same reasons that people are online in the West. So I think this is something of a misconception in the West. Of course, there are people out there who are very anti-Communist Party, but the Chinese government has created through its economic policy this sort of new middle class in the cities, and they're using it not so much for political means.

BRAND: Well, what happens if people do use these blogs for political means? What would the government do?

GIFFORD: Well, they have a very sophisticated way, increasingly sophisticated way of controlling things. They have a lot of filters. They have a lot of systems that can check certain words. If you put in certain words, they can be detected. And there are thousands and thousands of Internet police in China, people who do check to see if people are saying--bloggers are writing things that they shouldn't be. And the government does have the overall control. They can shut down these Web sites. They can shut down these blogs. It's really very easy for them. But the arrival of the Internet has really presented the Chinese government with this great dilemma. It needs the Internet. It wants people to use the Internet. They know it's a tool for economic growth, but they have to be very careful. They want to be careful that it's not used for political dissent, and really so far I think they do have a lot of the tools to do that.

BRAND: Well, these new restrictions, do you think they're going to work?

GIFFORD: I think they probably will work to some extent. The government still has the ability to control things here, but if you're looking at the big picture and the long term, I really think that the real revolution, if you like, is really just in the maturing of the minds of the people who are online. It's not that they're going and reading the human rights sites. It's not that they're reading The New York Times. It's just they're getting to know about the world. So whether the government controls the minutiae, the little Weblogs, whether the government controls, you know, the sites that people can go to, of course, that is important to a degree, but it's just the flood of information that's coming in, the access to information really that in the end is a revolution in itself here.

BRAND: NPR's Rob Gifford in Beijing. Thanks, Rob.

GIFFORD: Thanks very much, Madeleine.

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