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China moves to control Sina Weibo social network

Clearly, the march of the internet is much faster than Maoist long march. And this exposes the limits of Beijing which loves to be marooned in the past even as it created its own red aristocracy, who like to unabashedly flaunt their ‘power’.

After making giant strides to regulate the internet, the Chinese government has turned its attention to social network sites, like Sina Weibo (way-bore) in a bid to silence brewing dissent.

Anyone wishing to post on one of China’s networks must now register with their real names, allowing the government to easily find them if they write anything contentious, says the Daily Telegraph in a dispatch from Beijing.
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An estimated 250 million Chinese use Sina Weibo Sina out of 513 million netizens in the country but hours after the new regulation came into force, only 19 million of them registered with their real names. Launched three-years ago, Sina has had a phenomenal growth as an interactive platform for the Chinese brought up in a sanitized atmosphere.

Seen as the Chinese version of Twitter, the ‘way-bore’ largely became the country’s most important source of information for the youth.

The web site carried largely unfettered stream of news, gossip, entertainment, scandal and opinion, all posted in real time. This has confounded the Chinese government’s attempts to cover up or play down issues, and has forced officials to pay more attention to the public, the British daily reported.

Some 50,000 government agencies, Communist party departments and officials have even opened their own ‘way-bore’ accounts. Large number of these ‘official’ accounts are a clever bid to police the social network site since the conventional censors are unable to keep pace with the spread of news and rumours on the portal.

Worry for the Communist leadership is the big influence microblogging can have in mobilizing the people against the regime. They came face to face with the ‘danger’ after two bullet trains collided in Wenzhou last July. Minutes after the train tragedy, demands spread like wild fire for a transparent investigation and real time facts. The government was forced to repeatedly revise the information it released.

A rumour that Kim Jong-un, the new North Korean leader, had been assassinated in Beijing swept through the internet earlier this month to the embarrassment of the Chinese leadership.

It is theses set backs in censorship management that have prompted the real-user name diktat. Under the new rules, the users must register their identity cards or their mobile phone numbers with Sina, and the other microblog sites before they can post their message on the platform. Unregistered users can only scan what others post.

Yet another ‘new’ regulation requires the social network platforms to delete ‘any posts deemed harmful to the national interest in five minutes’. It also decrees that the posts of users who have more than 100,000 followers should be reviewed.

Well, all this is no more than a brave attempt policing the internet.

Amnesty International estimates that roughly every 10,000 Chinese people surfing the net have their very own dedicated overseer. The Great Chinese Firewall, launched in 2003, allows Net Censors to block access to a vast swathe of the internet.

These strong-arms tactics have not paid full dividends. Clearly, the march of the internet is much faster than Maoist long march. And this exposes the limits of the regime that loves to be marooned in the past even as it created its own red aristocracy, who like to unabashedly flaunt their ‘power’.

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