Dealing with the myth of 30,000 internet police

Rebecca MacKinnon

Regular readers here know how pissed off I can get when this magical number of 30,000 police monitoring the Chinese internet show up in articles. For me it has become a symbol of ignorance, of journalists who just reinforce wrong information from their colleagues without any check.
Fortunately, assistance professor Rebecca MacKinnon, talked yesterday to the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club (here in a report by Tim Johnson) about this and other misunderstandings regarding the internet in China.

Portals know when bloggers on their websites push the envelope. Company liaisons start getting phone calls. The stakes are huge. The portals could be closed themselves. So they are often vigorous in policing themselves.