Beijing, July 31: Censorship and limits on freedom of expression are rising in China as the government struggles to contain rising unrest across the country.

New regulations issued by China’s State Council last week prevent theatre companies and artists from performing any works that “oppose the basic principles of the constitution that place the Communist Party as the ruling party.”

Commercial performances should also refrain from performances that “are deemed harmful to the state ... endanger state unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, endanger state security or the honour or interests of the state,” The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s Communist Party, reported.

Foreign entertainment enterprises are also barred from running song, dance or theatre groups, local visits by foreign performers will require collaboration with Chinese partners. Just last month, the government had also reversed a rule that allowed local media firms to enter into partnerships with overseas media firms and tightened controls on foreign media companies operating in China.

The moves come in the wake a rising social and political unrest, which senior leaders see as a threat to their control and national stability.

In recent months hundreds of riots by groups as diverse as retirees demanding withheld pensions, farmers protesting land seizures, citizens incensed by government corruption and ethnic minorities inflamed by prejudice have rocked different parts of China. The worst trouble came in Shenyou, about 90 km from Beijing, on June 16 when thugs attacked locals resisting a forced buyout of their land killing six people and injuring about 50.

Authorities had tried to squelch news of the unrest by sealing off the affected areas and detaining journalists trying to cover the situation. But with 100 million people in China now connected to the Internet and more than 280 million owning cell phones, news of the riots spread quickly across the country.

Existing controls on the Internet, such as intrusive monitoring by about 30,000 human censors as well as advanced filtering techniques developed with help from US corporations such as Cisco, are being strengthened. But the government has also been putting in place new and innovative censorship and control tools.

One plan calls for government operatives to infiltrate Internet chat groups where criticism of the government is rising and improve the Communist Party’s image by posting pro-government propaganda, Southern Weekend, a newspaper based in southern Guangzhou province reported.

The plan has already been operational in Suqian city in the eastern province of Jiangsu since April. The infiltrators are government officials who have been carefully selected by Suqian city’s propaganda department on the basis of their “understanding of official policies, knowledge of (political) theories and political reliability”, the weekly said.

A local company, Venus Information Technology, has also been appointed to develop SMS monitoring software and its package has already been implemented in politically sensitive areas, like the central Henan province.

Plans to create a network of 100 satellites capable of monitoring every inch of Chinese territory by 2020 are also in place. In addition to monitoring environment and urban growth, the network would monitor “various activities of society”, Shao Liqin, an official in the ministry of science and technology, recently said.

Significantly, pressure on foreign journalists, who were hitherto treated with kid gloves, is also rising.