Chinese Bloggers Sucessfully Resist New Internet Checks

China’s bloggers aren’t much liked by their government. Some of them don’t speak kindly of President Hu Jintao and the Communist Party, so some are censored - even jailed in a number of circumstances. And lately those in charge have made known their drive to require bloggers “use their real names” upon registration of their blogs. Tuesday May 22, however, marked the beginning of the end of such an initiative, due to “an outcry over the proposal from the Internet industry.”

Nevermind the fact that a land of one-billion-plus individuals would be bound to have many, many duplicate titles. Having to enforce such a program to promote transparency and the expedient discovery and prosecution of dissenters and other people dubbed unsavory by state officials on such a large scale (one that is expanding quickly, too) would be an unmanageable burden, both on China’s Web industry and the government itself.

Therefore, instead of enacting mandatory transparency through the required registration of real names (the number of petty crimes associated with falsification of identities alone would be borderline bizarre at the least), the government will “encourage” that bloggers do so.

Though China packs the most citizens of any nation in the world (India places second on the list), only 140 million countrymen and women are known to be “connected.” As a good percentage of China remains in poverty, many more individuals opt to utilize mobile phone technologies as their modern tools of connectivity. About 450 million, to be precise. Nonetheless, monitoring even a sizable portion of a group already 140 million-strong has proven to be rather difficult for the Chinese government in the past few years, and any significant efforts to quell unrest – especially that which is gauged in words – in the future will be met with increased agitation, not only within China’s borders, but without.

Today we see estimates of roughly 20 million blogs registered by users in the PRC, or People’s Republic of China. A large number indeed. Too large to effectively parse for malfeasants. (Apart from the publicly notable and visible.) Too large to require real name checks. To be frank, the idea of such procedures alone is too absurd to seriously ponder.