Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – More than 450 million Chinese use the Internet. Increasingly, news are spread online, including those about abuses by the authorities, which have responded by boosting censorship and controls to nip in the bud all forms of dissent organised via the net.

“By the end of November, the number of internet users had reached 450 million, a rise of 20.3 per cent compared to the same period last year,” said Wang Chen, minister for the press office of the State Council, China's cabinet. That marks an increase of 30 million since July.

Such growth is not only quantitative. China's booming online population has turned the Internet into a forum for citizens to express their opinions in real time in a way rarely seen in a country where the traditional media is under strict government control.

This rapid change worries the authorities, concerned about net-organised groups whose rise might fuel social protests. In fact, Beijing has set what has been dubbed the “Great Firewall of China” to stop sites that address issues deemed sensitive by the authorities, like Taiwanese independence or the Tiananmen Square massacre. At any given time, tens of thousands of police monitor the net to identify and block sites deemed dangerous.

Ostensibly, this is done to stop pornographic or otherwise inappropriate sites, especially for youth.  

More than 60,000 pornographic websites were shut down on the mainland this year, netting almost 5,000 suspects in the process. Of these, 1,332 received “criminal punishment” with 58 jailed for five years or more, Wang said. “But our campaign has not come to a stop. This will be a long battle,” he explained.

In 2010, the government checked the content of 1.79 million websites and deleted 350 million pornographic and lewd articles, pictures and pieces of video footage, including sites that carried sensitive words like ‘Liu Xiaobo’ or ‘2010 Nobel Peace Prize’. AsiaNews’s own website has also been blocked, although it remains accessible via proxy server.

Beijing has blocked, both temporarily and permanently, a number of other popular (but non-pornographic) websites and internet services, including Google's YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, as well as content sharing sites, where an effective control is almost impossible.

For the government, these sites carry content harmful to national security and in breach of the law, including images of protests in sensitive regions such as Tibet.

Google Inc., the world's top Internet search engine, closed its China-based search service in March, two months after it said it would stop censoring search results in response to increasing limits on freedom of expression and to what it said was a sophisticated cyber attack that it traced to the mainland. The case was serious enough that it prompted a diplomatic row between China and the United States over web freedom.

More recently, the authorities were successful in getting the literary magazine Party to close down. After clocking more than 440 million hits, its owner, blogger Han Han, “decided to freeze and seal up the 'Party' indefinitely and dissolve the team," he wrote on his blog Tuesday. It is widely believed that he bowed to pressure from China’s censors. Time magazine had named Han among the world's 100 most influential people, along with US President Barack Obama and pop star Lady Gaga.

In China, the Internet has also become a lucrative marketplace. The value of online payments is expected to hit one trillion yuan this year, Beijing-based research company Analysys International said in a note.