BEIJING - China will expand nationwide a trial program that requires users of the country’s wildly popular microblog services to disclose their identities to the government in order to post comments online, the government’s top Internet regulator said yesterday.
The official, Wang Chen, said that registration trials in five major eastern Chinese cities would continue until wrinkles were worked out. But he said eventually all 250 million users of microblogs, called weibos here, would have to register, beginning with new users. Wang indicated that under the program, users could continue to use nicknames online, even though they would still be required to register their true identities.
Wang leads the State Council Information Office, which regulates the Internet and the government’s domestic public-relations machine. He also is a deputy director of the Communist Party’s propaganda department and, in particular, is in charge of China’s lavishly financed recent efforts to burnish its image worldwide.