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China is imposing new regulations to control content on its news Web sites, the government said Sunday, another step in its ongoing effort to police a rapidly expanding Internet population.

The rules, issued by the Ministry of Information Industry and the State Council, China's cabinet, will "standardize the management of news and information" in the country, the official Xinhua News Agency said. They take effect immediately, it said.

The report did not give any details on the regulations but said sites should only post news on current events and politics. It did not define what would be acceptable under those categories.

Only "healthy and civilized news and information that is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of the nation, beneficial to its economic development and conducive to social progress" will be allowed, Xinhua said.

It added: "The sites are prohibited from spreading news and information that goes against state security and public interest."

[...]

Earlier this month, a French media watchdog group said e-mail account information provided by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) helped lead to the conviction and 10-year prison sentence of a Chinese journalist who had
written about media restrictions in an e-mail.

Also as part of an ongoing effort to curb potential dissent, thousands of cybercafes -- the main entry to the Web for many Chinese unable to afford a computer or Internet access -- have been closed.

Authorities in Shanghai have installed surveillance cameras and begun requiring visitors to Internet cafes to register using their official identity cards to keep tabs on who's seeing and saying what online.

The government also recently threatened to shut down unregistered Web sites and blogs, online diaries in which users post their thoughts for others to read.

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:
I bet Bill Gates is only too happy to sell them the software to make this crackdown more efficient...

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I don't believe Microsoft has been established as having a particularly crucial role in any Chinese censorship projects, though I may have missed a rumour somewhere. Cisco Systems has been the name to come up most frequently, and is generally understood to have been central to work on the so-called Great Firewall of China, for which it got much criticism from the geek community, as it continues to, quite rightly in my opinion. Sun Microsystems and Novell have also been fingered as a contributor to Chinese government monitoring projects. And that's because these are all strong companies in the business of building large-scale network appliances and designing customised network software solutions. Microsoft by comparison doesn't know its ass from an ethernet port. Hell, Microsoft had to steal their goddamn command line FTP client, FTP.EXE, from BSD for use for Windows 9X (a BSD copyright notice remains in the code and can be found using a hex editor).

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Originally posted by Fidel:
Who do the Chinese think they are, the FBI ?.

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