Bowing to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s campaign of moral rectification, called the “Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces”, well-known Chinese blog sites issued a pact of self-discipline to promote what they called “civilized Web use”. The announcement followed a similar pact among major Internet portals operating in China, including Yahoo, on April 9.
The pact generally called on participants to “obey the law and uphold social morals”, but much Chinese news coverage focused on the need to eradicate the use of blogs to spread insults, defamatory language or sensationalism, practices that have been on the rise. Sites signing on to the pact pledged to delete such language as soon as it appeared on the Web.
The agreement once again showed the willingness of Internet sites and service providers to cooperate with Chinese government censorship. Neither the April 9 agreement between Internet portals nor the latest between blog sites specify what types of speech will pass muster. [Coverage by Beijing Entertainment Post]. [Coverage by Yangcheng Evening News]. [Shenzhen Coverage].
[Posted by CMP Intern Reona Hu, April 24, 2006, 10:32am]