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Social media under increased scrutiny in China

BEIJING: On Wednesday morning, Qiao Mu, who is one of more than 80 million people who log on to China's popular Twitter equivalent, Sina Weibo, posted a message quoting from United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech last week on the importance of Internet freedom.

Within hours, his message disappeared — but not before hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese netizens had seen it.

Mr. Qiao, who is a professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and the director of its Centre for International Communications, received a stern warning from Weibo's administrators, that same afternoon, for venturing into taboo territory. He was warned that posting “harmful information” would lead to the termination of his account.

Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging website, has, in recent months, become the focus of attention of China's vast censorship apparatus.

Weibo and other microblogs have quickly spread their presence in a country where Twitter and other social networking websites like Facebook are blocked. Their rapid growth, analysts say, is posing a new challenge to the authorities' hold on information — microblogs are providing millions of Internet users in China a platform to rapidly disseminate information on a never-before-seen scale.

“After what happened in Egypt and Tunisia,” Mr. Qiao told The Hindu in an interview on Saturday referring to the protests that were coordinated through social media, “the government seems to be taking no chances.”

In a speech on Saturday, Chinese President Hu Jintao hinted at the new challenges posed by this new information landscape. He called for strengthening the “management of the Internet”, as well as establishing mechanisms “to guide public opinion”.

A year and a half after Weibo's launch, the Chinese government has, so far, appeared nimble enough to respond to the new challenges posed by these information platforms, according to Mr. Qiao and other analysts.

Among Weibo's many levels of monitoring, searches for sensitive terms are often blocked. A case in point was after the protests in Egypt, when searches for the Chinese characters for “Egypt” and “Cairo” were restricted.

On Sunday, another phrase found its way to Weibo's blocked list — usages of the phrase “Jasmine Revolution” were blocked, after some United States-based Chinese websites posted a message urging people in 13 cities to protest for political reform, referring to the term used to describe the protests in Tunisia.

The call for protest, which was circulated through Chinese microblogs on Saturday night, received little response in Beijing. No protesters appeared to turn up at the listed protest site, in a busy shopping area. However, dozens of policemen and plainclothes security officers surrounded the site on Sunday afternoon. They were taking no chances.

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