China to strengthen Internet regulation in 1st quarter

China's management of personal websites is absolutely not aimed at banning them and China will strengthen its Internet regulation in the first quarter of 2010, Li Yizhong, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, recently said in an interview with Phoenix Television.

In response to the question of whether China will completely ban personal websites, Li said some netizens have had some misconceptions about this issue. The earlier Internet regulation campaign took relevant measures targeting porn websites, but the measures also included inappropriate methods to handle personal websites. He hoped that netizens may understand this.

"The approach is to suspend the operations of the websites first, and then clear up harmful websites before resuming their operations successively, and the above problems relating to personal websites are likely to occur during the process," Li said.

Data shows that by the end of 2009, China shut down over 136,000 unregistered websites nationwide, and closed or blocked over 15,000 pornographic websites. The large-scale campaign caused the temporary unavailability of many well-known websites because of their involvement in the proliferation of harmful information.

Li further stressed, "The Chinese Government has launched the Internet rectification campaign for the purpose of watching for pornographic information on the Internet and on mobile phones. We direct the campaign at illegal pornographic information and we just want to remove, delete and block relevant information so as to purify the Internet environment. Blocking websites is not our goal."

As for how long the rectification campaign will last, Li disclosed, "We will make further efforts to push the campaign forward at least in the first quarter of this year." He added that they will observe the effect of the campaign after some more time.