China Says It Will Continue Banning Internet Content

Liu Jianchao, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday that his country would continue to impose traffic restrictions on various Internet websites, which the Beijing authorities deemed to be unacceptable and in direct violation of the Chinese law. Delicate subjects such as that of Tibet, Taiwan, and the Dalai Lama are strictly kept off-print, and users' access to many sites in the Western world, including blogs and some social media sites, is blocked.

"Undeniably, on some Web sites, there are some issues that go against Chinese law. For example, some Web sites are actually creating two countries – that is one China, one Taiwan. They treat Taiwan as an independent country, which is against our law of anti-secessionism," Jianchao said in a regular press conference.

Beijing has also banned some of its own sites, including one that published news in Chinese. It claims that any news of the rebel island of Taiwan is illegal, and that any attempt of a secession will be met with deadly force. The West tried to force China's hand in recognizing the sovereignty of the small island on numerous occasions, but the massive nation threatened to use “everything at its disposal” to defend its territory, so all attempts failed.

"It's clear that China has no intention of fulfilling the hopes it raised when it was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games that the Chinese media universe would enter a period of expansion. Instead, all we have seen is a continuation of the same narrow policies of official resistance and restriction of foreign and local media," Bob Dietz, Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement.

Currently, China has a very powerful blocking mechanism in place, which prevents some 250 million Internet users from accessing specific outside sites. The authorities fear that reading about the forces that oppose Beijing may inspire some people to take direct action against the government, and if there's one thing a Communist country does not want, it's this.