As impractical and as menacing as is seems, the Chinese government has issued regulations that allow the country’s mobile phone service providers to monitor all of the text messages sent and received in the country. Given that approximately 300 million Chinese mobile phone users sent over 220 billion text messages in 2003, Beijing’s latest edict is staggering both in its scope and in the damage it will do to the freedom of communication and the dissemination of news in China.

While these regulations are targeted towards identifying pornographic and the somewhat vague concept of “fraudulent content,” the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders reports that a Chinese company involved in marketing one of the text message monitoring systems stated that “false political rumors” and “reactionary remarks,” will also be under observation.

According to Venus Info Tech, a company that sells the message monitoring software to Chinese mobile phone service and message providers, certain key words and combinations of those key words may generate an automatic alert, which will be sent to the police. China Mobile Corporation, which controls 65 percent of the Chinese mobile phone market, will implement the new and Orwellian regulations. During this past week, the government forced 20 message service providers to close shop as a punishment for insufficiently monitoring inappropriate messages.  
  
As Beijing was gleefully stifling freedom of expression and the spread of information, the residents of Hong Kong staged an enormous pro-democracy protest. On Thursday, July 1, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in Hong Kong to express their fury at Beijing’s recent decision that the citizens of Hong Kong will not be able to directly elect their leader next year. The protest was held on the seventh anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule; while Beijing called on the people of Hong Kong to take the opportunity to celebrate the anniversary of the handover, approximately 530,000 people — although estimates range anywhere from 200,000 to 680,000 people — marched peacefully in the 95 degree heat. The scope of the demonstration is made all the more impressive by the fact that the population of Hong Kong is a mere 6.8 million. Given that the new mobile phone regulations will target political dissent, it is precisely this kind of political demonstration and expression of discontent that is under threat.    

China’s decision to police private text messages is troubling not only because it is anathema to the concept of a free and safe exchange of ideas, but also because text messaging has proven to be profoundly influential; when the Chinese authorities attempted to cover up the SARS outbreak in 2003, it was the millions of private text messages that were sent that alerted the populace to the outbreak and exposed the government’s cover-up of the epidemic. According to The New York Times, “Text messages have also generated popular outrage about corruption and abuse cases that had received little attention in the state-controlled media.” In a nation where the media is scrupulously monitored, these new mobile phone regulations are dangerously close to choking off the last and private outlet for the exchange of ideas and the dissemination of news.    

Mimi Hanaoka