Beijing Makes Microblog Users Reveal Identities to Boost Control

By Bloomberg News
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Beijing will force microblog users
to verify their identities, tightening control of the world’s
largest Internet market as a siege at a village in southern
China underscores the threat of social unrest.
The rules were announced by the official Xinhua News Agency
yesterday as Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like service run by U.S.-
listed Sina Corp., blocked references to Wukan, where armed
police are engaged in a standoff with villagers.
Chinese officials have pressured microblog services to
strengthen supervision of users after a fatal rail crash in July
sparked an outburst of criticism of the government. The sites
should serve the Communist Party and stop the spread of “false
and harmful information,” the nation’s top Internet regulator
said in October.
“The focus right now is Weibo, because it is putting the
most pressure on the government,” said Bill Bishop, a Beijing-
based independent media consultant. “The ongoing campaign to
rein in the Internet is closer to the beginning than the end,
and they are going to continue this drumbeat.”
Microblogs have at least 300 million registered users in
China. Sina Weibo accounted for 66 percent of the market in
August, according to a Sept. 15 report by BOCOM International.
Tencent Holdings Ltd. is the second-biggest operator with a 25
percent share, it said.
Sina, based in Shanghai, plunged to a 15-month low in New
York trading, sinking as much as 11 percent to $46.86. Tencent,
China’s biggest online games company, rose 1.7 percent to
HK$152.70 in Hong Kong yesterday.

‘Will Slow’

“The growth of microblog services will slow” as a result
of the new rules, Connie Gu, a Beijing-based analyst at BOCOM,
said by telephone yesterday.
Under the new rules, Beijing’s municipal government will
ban users from setting up fake microblog accounts and sending
tweets containing state secrets and information that harm
national security, Xinhua reported yesterday. Two telephone
calls to the Internet information office at the Beijing city
government weren’t answered yesterday.
China will punish microblogs that spread lies or rumors as
it seeks a “healthy, orderly microblogging environment,”
Xinhua reported in October, citing Wang Chen, director general
of the State Internet Information Office. Microblogs should
promote science, culture and social morality and shouldn’t carry
“rumors” or “illegal information,” it said then.

‘Based on Rules’

In the southern province of Guangdong yesterday, police
armed with shotguns restricted movements in and out of the
village of Wukan, where protests broke out this week after the
death in police custody of a local butcher.
A search yesterday for the keyword “Wukan” in Chinese on
Sina Weibo returned a message saying “based on rules and
regulations, results on ‘Wukan’ cannot be displayed.”
Liu Qi, a Beijing-based spokesman at Sina, declined to
comment on the new rules when reached on his mobile-phone
yesterday.
In May, China set up the State Internet Information Office
to supervise online news and content. The country had 485
million Internet users at the end of June, more than the
combined populations of the U.S. and Japan.
China’s system of Internet surveillance, also known as the
“Great Firewall,” requires domestic operators including
Tencent, Sina and Baidu Inc. to self-censor content deemed
unacceptable to the government, and blocks overseas services
such as Google Inc.’s YouTube, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.
Criticism of the government spread across Weibo after two
high-speed trains collided in the eastern city of Wenzhou in
July, killing 40 people. Users questioned the government’s
handling of the crash and spread commentary and photos of the
accident at odds with the official version of events.

Arab Spring

In February, Chinese Internet users were unable to search
for content about Egypt on microblog services, as anti-
government protests escalated in the Middle Eastern nation.
Google said in March China was disrupting its Gmail e-mail
service and disguising the blockage as technical issues on the
part of the U.S. company. Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for China’s
Foreign Ministry, said at the time the claim was
“unacceptable.”
“This does illustrate the paranoia of the authorities in
light of Arab spring,” said Duncan Clark, chairman of Beijing-
based telecommunications consultant BDA China. “But attempting
to control Weibo users will be like grabbing fish in the sea --
I suppose they can spear one or two and make an example but then
the fish will all just swim away to another sea.”