No other country is experiencing such a boom in internet users as China. And few countries share China’s strict censorship rules. So can China and the internet ever truly function side by side, or is it a partnership that is doomed to controversy and, ultimately, failure?

Partly due to the sheer size of China’s population, and partly thanks to the rate of development, more people connect to the internet in China than in any other country. China now has more internet users than the United States, with 210 million netizens at the end of 2007. This has meant that some of the world’s most popular websites are Chinese. The most read blog in the world is Lao Xu, written by actor and director Xu Jinglei. The largest distributor of online video is Tudou, overtaking YouTube with over one billion megabytes of data transferred daily.

But the Golden Shield, or Great Firewall – means that various websites are banned by the Chinese government. When the internet arrived in China in 1987, many in the West hoped that it would augur some degree of political reform. But this has not been the case.

The methods the government uses to censor the internet include IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering and packet filtering. They block sites covering taboo topics such as police brutality, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, freedom of speech and Marxist thought, as well as pornography and sites offering information about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

But many people believe that the Chinese government will be powerless to stop the internet breaking down their strict rules on censorship in the future. Already the web has brought about changes in judicial matters. The killing of Wei Wenhua after he filmed a fight between villagers and officials was not widely broadcast by the Chinese media and thus not brought to public attention, but bloggers documented it with outrage, leading to the authorities taking a stand and arresting four suspects.

Keso, the pen-name of blogger Hong Bo, believes that “The Chinese internet has a distinctive character. It’s one of the most strictly controlled in the world, but netizens’ behaviour still confounds the government’s expectations. They ban websites and posts, but they haven’t got everything under control.”

So perhaps the future will see China’s stringent censorship policy relaxed. As pioneer blogger Isaac Mao states “I believe the internet will change China more than China changes the internet.”

Justin Drummond,

Chief Executive - Media Corporation plc