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SECURING THE GLOBAL VILLAGE Asian Authorities use the internet as a fiercy mean to manipulate and miseducate their peoples. An insight.    | Charles Henri (Berlin). Limiting the boundless oportunities of the Internet seems impossible, but is in fact easy to achieve. Unfortunately the countries with the highest number of internet users, such as China or the US have the best developed mechanisms to track down emails, history data and editors of online chats and panels. There are almost 600.000 websites approved by the authorities in China these days. Which represents a 60 per cent increase in perspective to 2002. While most western Internet firms are struggling to emerge from the crisis caused by the oversupply, China still is an El Dorado. Many firms like Yahoo! therefore agree to censor their offers. Additionally the Chinese authorities make effective use of the Internet as a propaganda vehicle, the contents of the news agency website, www.xinhuanet.com, and the online version of China Daily, www.chinadaily.com.cn, being completely controlled by the Communist Party. And there are other examples for the manipulation of the web: the sites www.tibetinfo.com.cn and www.tibetology.com.cn, for instance highlight living conditions in Tibet and the central government's respect for human rights, trying to mould Chinese public opinion and assuage foreign criticism. In times of crisis the government even treat people to post attacks on other countries, to foster discontent toward external targets. In February 2004, the government issued directives designed to ban sensitive issues from discussion forums on the major Chinese portals such as sohu.com and sina.com. Beijing also stepped up its programme of closures of small cyber-cafés. As they are hard to monitor, cyber-cafés will henceforth only be operated by a few large retail chains which are closely linked to the state and which will be forced to install standardized surveillance systems. Nowadays, it just is not easy to talk politics on the Internet in China. | More informations on press freedom and censorship in china and on other continents are available on www.rsf.org