Blogs Threaten Chinese Communist Rule

An Associated Press political analysis of the recent CRACKDOWN by the Communist Party in China surmises that the new regulations reflect the government's challenge in suppressing political speech in blogs, chat rooms, message boards, e-mail newsletters and via SMS text messaging. The government has been more successful at quashing free speech on news sites and search engines, thanks to help from Microsoft, Yahoo and others, but individual posts by China's millions of Internet users are proving difficult to control. Meanwhile, protests in the country are growing, fueled by information exchanged through "illegal" Internet channels and organized by peer-to-peer media like text messaging.