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According to the AFP news agency, users have been prevented from using the terms 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'human rights' on the new Chinese version of Microsoft's Internet portal. Other words and phrases that have been blocked include 'demonstration' and 'Taiwan independence'.

Anyone attempting to use these expressions in a blog is warned that they are not permitted and asked to choose an alternative. Profanities and pornography are also censored.

The Chinese regime has always maintained strict controls over the Internet amid fears that it could be used to organise the kind of opposition that resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

Despite its refusal to countenance democratic reform and poor human rights record,

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, China has had little difficulty attracting major IT firms to its huge potential market and vast reserves of cheap labour.

Under new laws introduced in March, all China-based websites must register with the authorities before 30 June 2005 or they will be shut down. Microsoft is not the only company to have complied with the government; anti-censorship group Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) have attacked Yahoo!, in an open letter, and Google for 'making compromises that directly threaten freedom of expression'.

Chinese officials claimed last week that 75 per cent of sites had registered. RSF says that an anonymous source in the Ministry for the Information Industry (MII) told it that although bloggers are required to register, there is little point, as there is no chance of them getting permission to publish. MII will be deploying new software called Pa Chong (night crawler) which will trawl the Net for unregistered sites and block them.

RSF has called upon the US government to enforce the Global Internet Freedom Act of 2003, which was passed with the aim of tackling international Internet censorship and named China among the leading offenders.