Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Beijing (Fides Service) – A database consisting of 12 million documents forms the heart of the largest digital Chinese language library in the world opened in Beijing on 8 November. The aim of the government sponsored initiative is to make available in three years 80 % of all literary material published in China. The database is a collection of news from papers, magazines, books, on various fields of knowledge.
Pan Longfa, editor of the Chinese Academic Magazine at Qing Hua University in Beijing who was in charge of the opening of the cyber-library said: “While building the database we stressed the need to guarantee intellectual property rights and paid 31 million di Yuan (3,7 million dollars) to authors”. According to a recent survey, information in Chinese on the Internet includes 15 million documents on Chinese science, economy and culture of which only 150.000 have the copyright for publishing on the web.
If on the one hand with this initiative Beijing shows it is willing to make available to the people of China vast stores of information, there is a question of how the information is selected. With which criteria are the documents chosen, ideological or with criteria of authentic and free democracy?
On the one hand freedom of regulation by state laws allows the publication of material harmful for man, from pornography to hand books on how to build bombs or organise terrorist attacks, on the other the necessary limits must be a real expression of a democratic state, which has respect for the truth and dignity of the human person, and defends human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression, faith and thought.
It is clear that Beijing fears information on the Internet since it banned research motors Altavista and Google, last year and enforced strict control on Internet cafes frequented by political dissidents. Reporters without Frontiers organisation says in its 2003 Report that in China cyber-dissidents are arrested and tried. Official national sources said that at the end of April 2002, Internet users in China were 56.6 million, mainly in large cities.
(Fides Service 11/11/2003 lines 42 words 415)
