The Chinese government has begun cracking down on the relatively uncensored and lively bulletin boards run by universities.
According to a report in the Washington Post, university authorities have been responding to orders from above to clean up the talkboards by denying access to anyone off-campus, including alumni and students at other universities. The bulletin boards have not just been popular with students; anyone can access them, and many have, in search of discussion less regulated than bulletin boards hosted by private internet companies.
The crackdown will cut off reform-minded individuals and groups from each other and stop dead the free online sharing ideas and information.
An earlier New York Times article examined China's advances in web censorship, including an estimated 50,000 internet police officers assigned to making sure nothing gets said that shouldn't be. Authorities have been turning to new technologies that allow real-time seaching of email messages and redirecting internet searches to sanitised, copycat sites run by the government.
Finally the online population in China is expected to reach 120 million this year, according to a report in the China Daily. The sheer weight of numbers may eventually prove too much even for the Chinese government, but in the meantime they're leading the world in ways to render the web politically impotent.
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