Google Inc. has drawn up detailed plans to shut its search engine in China and is “99.9 percent” certain of going ahead with the closure, the Financial Times reported today, citing a person it didn’t name.

The company may make the decision very soon, while it will take time to carry out a closure to make sure staff don’t suffer reprisals from authorities, the paper said, citing the person as familiar with Google’s thinking. Marsha Wang, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Google, said she had no comment on the report when reached by phone.

Google said on Jan. 12 that it will stop filtering results in China after what it called an infiltration of its technology and the e-mail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. China yesterday called Google’s plan to defy government censorship rules “unfriendly and irresponsible.”

New York, March 11, 2010—A state official responsible for media regulation said Wednesday the government should require Chinese journalists to obtain official training to report the news, according to local and international news reports. Domestic journalists already need government-issued identity cards to work in China. 

Li Dongdong, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP), made the comments to a Xinhua News Agency reporter on Wednesday, shortly after a senior editor was removed from his post for co-authoring an editorial criticizing government policies.

The fight for free access to information is being played out to an ever greater extent on the Internet. The emerging general trend is that a growing number of countries are attemptimg to tighten their control of the Net, but at the same time, increasingly inventive netizens demonstrate mutual solidarity by mobilizing when necessary.
The Internet: a space for information-sharing and mobilizing
In authoritarian countries in which the traditional media are state-controlled, the Internet offers a unique space for discussion and information-sharing, and has become an ever more important engine for protest and mobilization. The Internet is the crucible in which repressed civil societies can revive and develop.
The new media, and particularly social networks, have given populations’ collaborative tools with which they can change the social order. Young people have taken them by storm. Facebook has become the rallying point for activists prevented from demonstrating in the streets. One simple video on YouTube – Neda in Iran or the Saffron march of the monks in Burma – can help to expose government abuses to the entire world. One simple USB flashdrive can be all it takes to disseminate news – as in Cuba, where they have become the local “samizdats.”

The gap between word and deed is often so deep in China’s political landscape that it is impossible to know where China’s leaders really stand. Premier Wen Jiabao again picked up our hopes in his recent address to the National People’s Congress (NPC), in which he talked about the importance of press and public monitoring of power. The spirit of Wen’s remarks was contradicted in dramatic fashion, however, by Hebei Governor Li Hongzhong (李鸿忠), who rebuked a Jinghua Times reporter at the NPC for asking a probing question without, as he suggested, sufficient care for the party’s propaganda discipline.

Premier Wen’s words were: “We must let the people criticize the government and monitor the government, giving full play to the supervisory role of news and public opinion, so that power is exercised in the full light of transparency!”

Reporters Without Borders urges the Propaganda Department to lift the censorship imposed on a joint editorial in 13 Chinese daily newspapers calling for the elimination of the internal passport system known as the “hukou.” The press freedom organisation has learned that journalists working for news media that published the editorial have been threatened with punishment.

“Initiating a debate about the hukou on the eve of a session of the National People's Congress in Beijing was a very positive move,” Reporters Without Borders said. “But, as usual, the Communist Party's Propaganda Department reacted with censorship and repression. This insult to common sense is yet another example of the tension between Propaganda Department conservatives and pro-reform media.”