THESE THREE COMMENTS are a sample from the chat rooms of Sina.com, China's most popular Web site, provoked by the collision between the United States spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter. Internet chat rooms provide people with a rare forum for expressing views in a country where the media is tightly controlled by the state and no civil organisation can exist without a government overseer. But the freedom they provide is limited and does not have a significant impact on government policy. Since the spy-plane crisis broke last Sunday, the chat rooms have been full of anger towards the US - but no one questions the official version of the collision or complains about the missile buildup against Taiwan that the plane was apparently monitoring. The companies operating the chat rooms work under severe restrictions announced by the Government last year. They are responsible for what appears and must keep for 60 days a record of the comments and of the people who expressed them, to be made available to the police if required. 'The Internet companies have monitors for each chat room who follow carefully what is being written and delete content they deem dangerous or unacceptable,' said one foreign telecommunications consultant. 'They are watching for material that is pornographic or anti-government, especially referring to Falun Gong, Taiwan or Tibet. The companies could be closed down if the authorities consider their content subversive.' In March, a schoolteacher in Sichuan who wrote 'Down with the Communists' in a chat room last August was jailed for two years. He was foolish enough to use his real name. Another surfer who posted pro-democracy slogans caused the chat room where they appeared to be closed down - but he was more computer-savvy and disguised his identity. If the Internet companies needed any further warning of how closely they are being watched, they had only to read the report of a March 29 meeting of the Communist Party's propaganda department and the Information Office of the State Council, called to discuss Internet news. The report praised the progress made by news sites set up last year by official newspapers and broadcasters, which aim to lure people away from the non-official sites, such as Sina.com, that remain the most popular. 'Propaganda departments of the central and local-party, and government organisations, must pay great attention to Web sites as a new tool of political and ideological work, and strengthen its leadership over them,' it said. Wang Chen, deputy director of the propaganda department, told his listeners they must implement the directives of the central committee on using the Internet as a tool of opinion and propaganda, and aggressively, accurately and comprehensively convey the party's policies and directives. 'We must strengthen the education of Marxist news values and professional ethics among those working in the news profession and promote people with a strong political sense and strict discipline,' he said. In other words, the same rules apply to China's Internet media world as to the terrestrial one. 'Those who express their views in chat rooms are not representative of the public,' said Wang Hongguo, a student in an Internet cafe. 'First, only a small proportion of people in China use the Internet, and they are young, well educated and computer literate. 'Second, those who express their opinions in chat rooms are mainly people with a grievance, who want to vent their anger and have no one to listen to them. Everyone else expresses their opinions to family, friends and colleagues. In China, it is safer like that.' Nonetheless, in a country with a state-controlled media, the chat rooms on Internet represent a channel for free speech. This week, if the chat rooms express a view different to that of the Government, it is that Beijing is being soft on the Americans and China should react more strongly. 'In a country like China, it is hard to say if there is public opinion independent of the Government,' said one Western diplomat. 'If people are anti-American and nationalist over the spy plane, it is largely a result of school education and coverage in the state media. 'Since the death of Deng Xiaoping and with the absence of a strong leader and the abandoning of socialism, patriotism has become the party's ruling ideology.' Last week, the Government was careful to restrain the level of patriotic anger. Demonstrators at the US Embassy in Beijing were taken away by police. Official newspapers did not carry offensive cartoons of President George W. Bush or Secretary of State Colin Powell. 'The Government wants to resolve this crisis and does not want it to get it of hand,' the diplomat said. Mark O'Neill is a member of the Post's Beijing bureau EMAIL9gfa
