An Article for Reading----China Expands Program Requiring Real-Name Registration Online.docVIP

China Expands Program Requiring Real-Name Registration Online By MICHAEL WINES Published: January 18, 2012 窗体顶端 窗体底端BEIJING — China will expand nationwide a trial program that requires users of the country’s wildly popular microblog services to disclose their identities to the government in order to post comments online, the government’s top Internet regulator said Wednesday. The official, Wang Chen, said at a news conference that registration trials in five major eastern Chinese cities would continue until wrinkles were worked out. But he said that eventually all 250 million users of microblogs, called weibos here, would have to register, beginning first with new users. Mr. Wang indicated that under the program, users could continue to use nicknames online, even though they would still be required to register their true identities. The announcement was long expected. Because the registration rules apply to Internet companies — most of which are in Beijing or the other four cities covered under the trial — the practical effect is to certify that the government will now formally require those companies to register all users of weibos eventually. Some users and analysts had suggested that such a requirement would be met with a public outcry. In fact, the response has been comparatively muted. Mr. Wang leads the State Council Information Office, which regulates the Internet and the government’s domestic public relations machine. He also is a deputy director of the Communist Party’s propaganda department and, in particular, is in charge of China’s lavishly financed recent efforts to burnish its image worldwide. The government has said that it is studying real-name registration of microbloggers to limit the spread of malicious rumors, pornography, swindles and other unhealthy practices on microblogs, which have become a major source of news for many Chinese. Free speech advocates generally condemn the move, saying that the microblogs’ freewheeling debate and frequ