One Chinese state media has reported that the ‘Real name system’ is recommended by the Internet Society of China (ISC) to the government. We havenot known when this will take action yet, but as the Internet Society’s secretary general, Huang Chengqing said, it is an unavoidable choice for Chinese blog industry, i.e. the internet content will sooner or later be regulated in China by another controversial Chinese way.
In fact, ‘Real name system’ is not new to the chinese. Earlier this year, the Information Industrial Bureau of China has annouced its Real name system for the mobile phone users. from 2007, all the Pay-as-you-go mobile users should show their Identity Cards to the operators and register their real personal information, e.g. name, address. Government said it is a positive step against the increasing high-tech crime, such as SMS Phishing.
Obviously, the chinese blogs are playing more and more important roles on the medias. Reported by the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC): by August 2006, the number of bloggers has reached approx. 17.485million, increased 30 times since 2002; 7.694million bloggers are updating their blogs regularly; 33.747million blog space has been registered;75.565million blog readers and 54.709million of them are reading the blog regularly. It will be a hugh mistake if you still donnot have a serious thinking on the chinese blog industry. However, the contents dumped into these blogs are somehow out of controls, which is what the govenment worries about. (Oh, yes. I guess everybody has the idea that the Chinese government is very and always sensitive to the political topics. But, sorry, I know it is one of the reasons, but as a pure technology fan, I dont want to talk about this here.) The chinese blog contents have covered almost everything in life: Travel, IT, Fasion, Science, Game, Finance, Healthy, etc. A single anonymous and unresponsible blog can easily mislead its audience and cause some unexpected results. Frankly speaking, it is a truth that the Internet Crime has dramatically increased and some contents such as Porn contents have indeed harmed the new chinese generation.
With ‘Real name system’, the government is trying to clean-up the Internet. An officer from ISC had his comments saying, “I dont understand why this system has caused such a big debating. If the blogger can publish his valuable thoughts with the responsiblity, why will he fear of registering his real name.”. Unfortunately, this explaination is not quite accepted by many chinese bloggers. I have talked to two bloggers whose blogs are recently on the top20 ranked by Feedsky (a chinese face of Feedburner) this morning. They both think the new system wont have too much effect on the IT blogs. However, they also worry that the chinese blog could be poisoned by the new system. The blogger might lose their creativity and motivation to express their feeling, ideas, complains etc, simply because they feel someone is watching them.
Poison or disinfector, what the ‘real name system’ is going to be? No matter which side you stand on, it is for sure the Chinese blog industry will be still expanding continuously, in a chinese controversial way.
Note:
- An officer from ISC has corrected the misunderstanding of this system. The blogger will be asked for his real name for the registration of a new blog, but that does not mean he should put his real name on his blog. (the blogger can still use his nickname, but his real name has to be appear on government’s records).
- Korea also propose its Real name system whice force web users to use their real names when surfing the internet in order to reduce the Internet crime, reported by AsiaMedia.