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The Associated Press
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Associated Press.
July 29, 1998, Wednesday, AM cycle
SECTION: Business News
LENGTH: 349 words
HEADLINE: Report: China to try entrepreneur in new Internet crackdown
DATELINE: BEIJING
BODY:
China plans to prosecute a computer engineer for providing 30,000 Chinese
e-mail addresses to a U.S.-based Internet democracy magazine, a human rights
group said Wednesday.
Lin Hai, the 30-year-old founder and manager of a computer software
company in Shanghai, was arrested on charges of
"inciting the overthrow of state power" and soon will be tried, according to the Information Center of Human Rights
and Democratic Movement in China.
Prosecutors in Shanghai have completed the indictment against him and plan to
hand the case over shortly for trial, the
group said. Conviction generally carries a penalty of up to five years in
prison.
Court and police officials in Shanghai said they did not know about the case.
Lin's arrest in April highlights the government's determination to prevent use
of the Internet as a tool to challenge Communist Party authority and strict
control over information. China has more than 1 million Internet
subscribers - most of them drawn from the educated elite - and the numbers of
new users are growing rapidly.
Shanghai's Internet police division recently has been reinforced with 150
additional computer experts, the Hong Kong-based center said. Some Chinese
Internet users have found their access blocked or even had their computers
confiscated
by police, the center said.
The publishers of Tunnel, a weekly online magazine featuring dissident
writings, were arrested in central Jiangxi province Monday, according to the
U.S.-based Chinese Democratic Party.
The party's Web site and other pro-democracy online publications have recently
been wiped
out by destructive computer programs engineered by China's police, the party
said.
The Telecommunications Ministry, which operates the servers that permit access
to the Internet, seeks to exert the same heavy-handed control in cyberspace
that it enforces over all print media, radio and television in
China.
Chinese authorities have moved decisively to close information loopholes since
President Clinton finished his visit to China earlier this month, the
Information Center said.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: July 29, 1998
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