China mutes online news

Experts agree that the year-old government of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao has, if anything, been quite attentive to the feelings of ordinary people. The tone and content of the current People's Congress, for example, is populist, and takes up the very sentiments raised by "netizens" in the BMW case.

The 10-day NPC, which ends Sunday, gathers some 3,000 delegates from around the country. While often described as a "rubber stamp," the annual event can showcase new emphasis and directions. Premier Wen offered tax plans and plans to redirect resources to help address the rich-poor gap, particularly among China's 800 million peasants and migrant workers in the interior, where tensions exist over rising costs and lack of education. The congress is also expected to outline private property rights, attack elite-level corruption, and direct resources to social welfare projects. Wen calls it "putting people first."

China's official news service points out that some NPC delegates use the Internet to understand public opinion and to cull new ideas. It points to a new survey by a team at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences showing that 71 percent of users say they "have more opportunities to express their views online."

Still, change is officially designed to take place gradually - something that often clashes with the immediacy of the Internet. For example, this week, a controversial letter written by military doctor Jiang Yanyong that asked China's leaders to reappraise the Tiananmen Square incident of June 4, 1989 was posted on the Internet and read widely in China. (Mr. Jiang treated the wounded during the tumultuous shootings. He also blew the whistle on the cover up of SARS in Beijing last spring.) His letter, which is not available on any official media in China or any semiofficial websites, is a plea for Beijing to call the 1989 demonstrations a "patriotic student movement."

The possibility of such information becoming easily available is behind the recent policy to close chat rooms that had fueled anger over the BMW case, sources say. One online forum on Sohu.com, known as "Starry Sky," was closed in recent weeks because it allowed unfettered discussions on various topics.

Internet media in China is privately owned. The principal and official sources of news - via TV, radio, and most high- circulation papers - are state owned and controlled by the party through the ministry of information.

In recent years, major Internet companies have been flirting more and more with information sources outside state control. Several companies formed journalists' departments, would sometimes use their own reporting, and began sending out news on cellphone text services and Web pages that was blended from local papers and foreign sources. Now such content is targeted.

Still, as Mr Horgan says: "At every point in the past, whenever there was a general effort to control Internet content, the leadership has always stopped short of doing something radical."

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