China
In the past year, China has shut nearly 50,000 Internet cafes for breaking its censorship laws, the Communist Party newspaper Renmin Ribao reported this week. Almost all of the offenses fell into two categories: allowing minors to access the Internet or failing to block Web sites with “harmful cultural information.” Some 87 million of China’s 1.3 billion people use the Internet, most of them in public places. The government supports the technology for scientific and teaching purposes, but takes great pains to prevent its use for political activism.
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