The Chinese may be as avid as their peers around the world when it comes to chatting on the Internet, but that doesn't mean their government likes the idea. Reporters Without Borders tells the BBC that messages critical of the Chinese government either don't show up in the first place or get purged from popular chat channels.
RWB also said Chinese law enforcement tracks down and even jails those who write such messages on a regular basis, employing an estimated 30,000 people just to monitor Chinese citizens' cyberlives.
The free speech advocacy group said they spent a month testing Chinese government surveillance of the Internet by trying to post messages to chat rooms popular among Chinese Web surfers. Any such messages criticizing China's government either never showed up in the chat rooms or were pulled after delays of a few hours to a day, depending on the suspected level of "sensitivity". At best, thirty percent of the group's politics-specific messages made it into the chat rooms.
The RWB finding was revealed not very long after Chinese Internet operator Huang Qi was sent to prison for "subversion." The BBC reported Huang was sentenced to five years for allowing articles on the 1989 pro-democracy protests and Tiananmen Square attack by the government to show up on his Website.
Huang was the first person China tried for Internet thought crimes, the BBC said, with "several others" since detained for posting political material on the Web. Huang's case, the BBC continued, "has drawn international attention because it highlights the struggle by the Chinese authorities to promote the commercial potential of the internet while controlling political content."
