Why China shut down 18,401 websites

"Maybe my perspective is different from CCTV or Xinhua," says Liu, referring to the state-owned TV and news agency. "But as long as I did not break any law or regulation, Sohu has an obligation to publish all of my articles," says Liu. "I think they breached our contract."

The Haidian district court in Beijing threw out his suit, he says, ruling that it did not meet required criteria to be heard. But he appealed last week to a higher court. "I want to send a message to all Chinese bloggers that when our rights are violated we have a right to sue these websites," he says. "And I want to know the reasons for which Sohu blocked my articles. They have subjective standards that I am ignorant of."

Confusion over what is permitted

Bloggers in China have long puzzled over what is and what is not allowed by the censors that operate at various levels, ranging from automatic filters that block posts containing sensitive keywords to "Net Nannies" employed by the larger Web-hosting services.

Different companies use different standards. Liu's nine articles, for example, appeared on the blog he operates on Sina.com, even though they were deleted by censors at Sohu.com.

"It is left to the discretion of private companies to a pretty large degree," says Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese Internet at Hong Kong University. "Censorship gets outsourced and delegated to private businesses, and it is in their interests to overcompensate to stay out of trouble."

Chinese censors target more than just pornography or dissident material. A reporter with "Chinese Sports Illustrated," Guan Jun, found that the blog he launched last month, titled "The Beijing Olympics: I Don't Support Them" was closed after six days. On his new blog, called "The Beijing Olympics: Opposition Is Not Allowed," Mr. Guan recounts a subsequent visit from "the relevant authorities [the police] ... to get an idea about my ideological stance, social connections, who I've been in touch with."

In the run-up to the next Party Congress, censorship has reached such a pitch that John Kennedy, an internet commentator on "Global Voices Online," wondered in a recent post, "If war were to be declared on bloggers, is the state of today's China blogosphere what it would look like?"

Voluntary censorship encouraged

Among the authorities' shots in this "war," since President Hu Jintao called last April for "the glorious development of web culture with Chinese characteristics," is a voluntary pledge by the largest Chinese content-provider companies to encourage bloggers to censor themselves and to register their real names. Among them are Yahoo! China and MSN China.

Real name registration – long mooted by the central government – has now become official policy in Xiamen, a southern city where the authorities allow servers to operate only if forum hosts ensure that all contributors register their real names and IDs, according to an industry source.

"They are trying to make things more trackable," the source says.

The authorities are also seeking to shut down information avenues that cannot be tracked. In recent days, bloggers complain, access to Feedburner.com, a news aggregator used by Netizens to access RSS feeds from blocked sites, has been seriously disrupted.

The new atmosphere has left many bloggers hoping that things will improve once the Party Congress is over.

One angry blogger, Chen Min, who works as an editor at "Southern Weekly," a sometimes outspoken newspaper based in Guangzhou, complained recently that, "In the past they always left at least a corpse but now they are ... deleting things as clean as a whistle."

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