A human rights group on Wednesday cried foul over recent moves of the Chinese Internet regulators, who want to reduce the anonymity among online users in mainland China.
State Council Information Office director Wang Chen, in his address to the national legislature in April, has called for the extensive system that would require all Internet users to use their real names when going online or buying a mobile phone.
Chen said that the new registration system will allow the Chinese government to better manage the Internet and the content being provided by its users.
The Chinese government tried to remove the full context of Chen’s speech from its websites to avoid the watchful eyes of its critics. The media’s reporting on the issue was abruptly cut by the government.
However, a New York-based human rights group in China, which managed to obtain the original copy of the speech, expressed fear that the new proposal would make another row of human rights violations in the country, saying that they have found “an unexpurgated text and discrepancies” in the documents.
“This only shows that Beijing is wary that its push for tighter information control to its people,” the group said in its China Rights Forum magazine.
China’s move, according to the group, will plug all the loopholes in its existing Internet control called “The Great Firewall” by limiting anonymous access to contents or comments online.
It will be recalled that the tight Internet control by the Chinese government led to row with online giant Google.
But the due to the large consumer and advertising potential of the country, Google was forced to vow down to the Chinese, allowing it to resume operations in the mainland after months of absence.
Despite the pervasive censorship and stricter controls online, China’s online population continued to grow with over 400 million active users, the largest in the world. Also, China has over 233 million mobile Internet users.
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