China's censors have vowed to step up measures on the growing number of bloggers using the internet to air their views on life, the universe and everything, writes Clifford Coonanin Shanghai.
The internet is a major headache for China's censors, which work hard to keep a tight rein on free debate online and have employed some 40,000 officials to monitor internet musings.
Blogs are a big growth business in China. China had 137 million internet users at the end of 2006, among whom 20.8 million were bloggers, according to a survey.
"We must recognise that, in an era when the internet is developing at a breakneck pace, government oversight and control measures and means are facing new tests," Long Xinmin, director of China's General Administration of Press and Publication, told China's annual parliament, the National People's Congress.
Bloggers represented a major challenge, said Mr Long, although he insisted "citizens' freedom of expression" would be fully protected. "The publishing administration authorities have been paying attention to this new mode of internet dissemination," he said.
The clampdown is most likely to affect independent bloggers attempting to publish investigative journalism or social commentary.
Internet censorship is carried out by many ministries in China. Last year, the Ministry of Information Industry issued rules aimed at making the rules which apply to officially sanctioned news also apply to bloggers and other online news outlets.
As it currently stands, bloggers' messages are checked by censorship software that filters for content containing politically sensitive words.
The blog articles then undergo further vetting by internet police and hundreds of thousands of messages are blocked every day.
Among the words that ring alarm bells with the online censors are Mao Zedong, Dalai Lama and any references to the Communist Party or the government.
Some bloggers, especially the more high-profile ones at universities, have to explain their comments to government officials, and are asked to co-operate when their politically sensitive comments are censored.