China will enforce a 24-hour monitoring over the Internet during the imminent annual meeting of top legislature, or the Third Plenum of the 10th National People's Congress (NPC).

Chat rooms and forums of major Chinese Internet portals will be monitored by "security guards" at these websites. Any messages submitted by Internet users will go through rigid censoring and filtering before appearing on the Internet.

"Some messages on the Internet are sent by those with ulterior motives," acknowledged Qin Rui Monday, deputy director of the Public Information and Internet Security Supervision Bureau under the Ministry of Public Security, at a meeting Monday to beef up Internet security as the NPC and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) start their annual meetings this week.

He said vicious attacks hurled by hackers or computer viruses would still exist in Chinese cyberspace.

Major Internet Service Providers including Beijing Telecom and Beijing Netcom and 14 major Internet portals and four Internet bar chains attended the meeting.

China has the world's second largest number of Internet users with an Internet population of 94 million.

(Xinhua News Agency March 2, 2005)