No Rumors Allowed In China

I always wondered how or whether it is possible for the Chinese government to censor internet usage in China.  It looks futile to me. First the Chinese government killed off Internet servers/browsers and installed the infamous dictator friendly Sina connection to better be able to spy on what the locals say about their dictators and dictatorship. That hasn't worked well, as the number of users in China is just so huge that monitoring every one of them is impossible. One might even call Mao a democratic sympathizer and get away with it.

So now the Chines government is attacking the "free speech on the internet" more directly.   China's Supreme People's Court and Procuratorate just announced that spreading rumors on the Internet could get you three years in prison in China, with the penalties rising if the rumor is re-posed more than 500 times or viewed by more than 5,000 people. This is the first time existing laws against "defamation and instigating instability" have been extended to the Internet in order to stop the folks from saying not so nice thing about how things work in China.

Here is what the court said in it's announcement. "In recent years, the Internet has been used to maliciously fabricate facts and damage the reputation of others … and to concoct rumors that mislead the people, causing serious disruptions of social order and even mass incidents." Uh, in other words, "stop telling the truth about what we do y to you."  Regardless, this is the first time the government has clarified what is illegal on the Internet. Before, there were rules governing pornography, but they had not addressed the issue of free speech on the Internet.

I guess the dictators are worried about "social harm" (a threat to their power over a brain washed population that has been bought off by economic benefits). But such censorship can't work in a modern world in which a nation (China) has fully embraced capitalism and all the freedoms that are attached to it. The new law will likely only have an effect on how these people choose to speak out, considering that any negative view of the government could be deemed a "rumor". In truth, the net and its users are more adaptable to a dictatorships rules and slow movements.

Good luck to the Chinese government, but the old world (dictators enforcing conformity on their population) loses to the new (technology that moves faster than the dictator) every time.