(19 February 2016) The Chinese government has issued new rules that ban any foreign-invested company from publishing anything online in China, effective next month.
The directive by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which will come into effect on 10 March, states: “Sino-foreign joint ventures, Sino-foreign cooperative ventures and foreign business units shall not engage in online publishing services.”
The banning of foreign media in China will be a hard blow to companies like Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the New York Times who have collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build up the Chinese publishing industry and do reports in Chinese, for a Chinese audience.
The only way anyone is going to publish anything online in China next month is if the business is 100% owned by Chinese companies and they must gain official approval from the regulatory authorities.
There is also new publishing laws that will be going into effect next month as well. Anyone found in breach of these new rules will have their publishing license revoked and will likely face arrest.
goodEreader has the story.
The new rules in Chinese are here.
