Chinese Government moves to trim saucy blogger's 15 minutes of fame

For the hundreds of thousands of people who log on to Furong Jiejie's website daily, her saucy self-portraits and delusional diary entries ("I have a physique that gives men nosebleeds") provide something to talk and laugh about during breaks at work.

But the dizzying rise of Furong, now the most talked-about woman in China, has prompted the Chinese Government to further assert its control over cyberspace.

With about 100 million users, China has the second-largest internet population in the world after the United States, and it is growing by millions each month.

To monitor what these increasingly curious "netizens" are reading, the authorities have intensified their surveillance by recruiting "web watchdogs" to anonymously police thousands of cyber-cafes and public message forums.

All Chinese websites, bloggers and bulletin-board operators must register with the Government - or be fined and shut down.

Furong Jiejie - the name literally means "hibiscus older sister" - seems likely to face that fate.

"We have been keeping an eye on sister Furong," said Liu Qiang, an official with the Ministry Of Culture, which is responsible for overseeing the internet. "But there aren't any explicit regulations to control such a phenomenon."

The latest in a series of online celebrities - known in China as BB, or bulletin-board, stars - to have emerged in the past couple of years, 28-year-old Furong is an unlikely candidate to run into trouble with the authorities.

Prone to posing in provocative photos - tame by Western standards - she has a hunger for fame but hardly seems a threat to society.

Nevertheless, the publicity department of the central committee of the Communist Party has told BlogChina, the largest provider of blog-hosting services, to relocate content relating to Furong to less prominent parts of their website.

The Government's heavy-handed approach is an indication of its ambivalent attitude towards the net.

"The Government sees the internet as vital for China's technological progress but, at the same time, they want to stop people from accessing content they see as unhealthy," says Chen Changfeng, deputy dean of Beijing University's School of Journalism and Communications.

The anti-Japan protests in March and April began online, with millions venting their anger in open forums over a history textbook that downplayed Japanese Army atrocities during World War II. Only later did the traditional media pick up on the story.

They have done the same with Furong Jiejie, but it seems that her 15 minutes of fame are up.

- INDEPENDENT