Houston Community News >> China Shuts down Over 18,000 Websites
9/24/2007 Beijing - Christian
Science Monitor reports that the Chinese authorities are in the midst of an
unusually harsh crackdown on the Internet, closing tens of thousands of websites
that had allowed visitors to post their opinions, according to bloggers and
Internet monitors in China.
The new censorship wave appears linked to next month's 17th Communist Party
Congress, a key political gathering that will set China's course for the coming
five years. Party leaders generally prefer to meet undisturbed by criticism.
Censors and Web-hosting firms always keep an eye out for unapproved views on
sensitive subjects, often deleting them.
But this campaign seems more indiscriminate. In recent weeks, police nationally
have been shutting down Internet data centers (IDCs), the physical computers
that private firms rent – from state-owned or private companies – to host
websites offering interactive features, say industry insiders. "With the
approach of the Party Congress, the government wants the Internet sphere silent,
to keep people from discussing social problems," says Isaac Mao, one of China's
first bloggers, who is now organizing a censorship monitoring project. "Shutting
down IDCs is a quick and effective way of shutting down interactive sites."
To avoid being blocked, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in China and
individual websites have been disabling chatrooms, forums, and other interactive
features that might provide a platform for viewpoints unacceptable to the
authorities.
"We don't want to get shut down so we shut down anything that could be
offensive," says one foreign ISP employee. "Our upstream provider [the company
that owns the servers] told us verbally there should be no commentary, no blogs,
no bulletin board services, because the government is going bananas."
More than 18,000 websites blocked
In a recent circular, one Shanghai-based ISP warned its clients that "a special
working party against illegal Internet information and activities" had begun
work on Aug. 30 and "started to focus on cleaning up pornographic videos … and
'harmful' information … and so took control of Internet information services
security management."
Earlier this month, the government-controlled "Shanghai Daily" reported that the
authorities had blocked access to 18,401 "illegal" websites since April. Just
under half of them carried pornography, the paper said, while the rest were
unregistered.
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