Heady Internet freedom in China as Great Firewall falls -- briefly

China has unveiled tighter Internet controls, legalising the deletion of posts or pages which are deemed to contain "illegal" information and requiring service providers to hand over such information to the authorities for punishment. The rules signal that the new leadership headed by Communist Party chief Xi Jinping will continue muzzling the often scathing, raucous online chatter in a country where the Internet off

The number of Chinese websites fell dramatically last year after the government tightened controls on the Internet, according to a new study by a leading state-run research institute.China has the world's biggest online population with 457 million Internet users and the web has become a forum to express opinions in a way rarely seen in the official media.But Beijing also operates some of the world's toughest web censorship, with a system known as the "Great Firewall of China" blocking access to any content deemed unacceptable.

The architect of China's vast Internet censorship system has admitted using software to circumvent the controls -- but only to probe just how secure his widely-criticised creation is.Fang Binxing said in an interview published Friday he uses six virtual private networks to scale the so-called "Great Firewall"."I have six VPNs on my home computer," Fang 50, said in the rare interview published in the Global Times newspaper.But Fang, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said he uses them purely to test the firewall's effectiveness.

A top Google executive said Tuesday that the Internet giant has set no timetable for its operations in China but remains firm in its plan to end censorship of Web search results there."We are reviewing our business operations (in China) now," Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told a congressional hearing on "Global Internet Freedom and the Rule of Law."Asked by the panel chairman, Senator Dick Durbin, whether Google has a timetable for ending the censorship of its Web search engine in China, Wong said: "We don't have a specific timetable."

China on Friday said US calls for Internet freedom were "harmful" to ties, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticised Chinese censorship of the web."We firmly oppose such words and deeds which go against the facts and are harmful to China-US relations," foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement posted on his ministry's website."We urge the United States to respect facts and stop using the so-called Internet freedom issue to criticise China unreasonably," he said.

The man widely seen as the architect of China's vast Internet censorship system known as the "Great Firewall" has had to take down his microblog after a storm of criticism by web users.Fang Binxing, the 50-year-old president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, removed his microblog on popular web portal Sina.com on Monday, just a few days after launching it, the Global Times said Wednesday.