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China's never-ending blog crackdown

Jon Skillings Editorial director
Jon Skillings is an editorial director at CNET, where he's worked since 2000. A born browser of dictionaries, he honed his language skills as a US Army linguist (Polish and German) before diving into editing for tech publications -- including at PC Week and the IDG News Service -- back when the web was just getting under way, and even a little before. For CNET, he's written on topics from GPS, AI and 5G to James Bond, aircraft, astronauts, brass instruments and music streaming services.
Expertise AI, tech, language, grammar, writing, editing Credentials
  • 30 years experience at tech and consumer publications, print and online. Five years in the US Army as a translator (German and Polish).
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Jon Skillings

We've seen this headline before: China cracks down on blogs, search engines.

But apparently Beijing thought it was time to remind its citizens once again that theirs is not an anything-goes Internet. In a stern and eerily vague pronouncement, the head of the country's Information Office says that the government will "take effective measures to put the BBS, blog and search engine under control" to combat what it sees as a rising tide of "illegal and unhealthy information," according to an AP story Friday.

China has 37 million blogs at the moment, but could have 60 million eventually this year and 100 million next year, a Tsinghua University study predicts. The country's leading search engine, Baidu, said earlier this week that it plans to launch a new blog service soon.

, whose ambitions in the big-and-getting-much-bigger Internet market in China have forced it into some uncomfortable compromises on what can and can't be searched for.