China is cracking down on all imported online music and games. The Chinese Ministry of Culture is requiring all distributors submit the imported products for review to official censors. The reason behind the censoring is to protect Chinese business interests and to censor political, violent or sexual content.
The new rules cover Web sites and mobile phone companies that carry music. Domestic distributors of Chinese music will have to register but they will not have to submit content to censors.
The crackdown happened because of “a rash of problems with imported online games, some of which contain sensitive religious material or refer to territorial disputes”, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
China has a healthy population of online game players. Currently they have 23 million game players up from 13.8 million in 2003 according to Xinhua. The revenues for this year are projected to reach $850 million.
There have been differing reactions to some of the posts I have come across.” America opens it’s borders and allows a flood of Chinese goods into the country without any kind of protecionism resulting in the loss of jobs and intense competition and China starts blocking American entertainment product in order to protect it’s own jobs and people?”,wrote nbforsale.
Another poster wrote,”China is only trying to keep the Internet clean,stop online piracy and protect people from porn and other obscene materials”. Probably the most balanced post was written by ogobeone. He summed the situation up nicely writing,” The more the Chinese government suppresses the Chinese,the more enemies it will make”.
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Mike is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
