The Internet, mobile phones and other new technologies are making it harder for China's communist rulers to block negative news, a top government official said in comments published on July 16.
"It has been repeatedly proved that information blocking is like walking into a dead end," the state-run China Daily newspaper quoted Wang Guoqing, a vice minister with the cabinet's information office, as saying.
"Wang revealed that some local government spokespeople used to believe that 90 percent of bad news could be muffled while only 10 percent would be unluckily exposed by the media," the China Daily said.
Wang said the central government's commitment to transparency, as well as new information technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones, were making it more difficult for local officials to hide bad news.
However, Reporters Without Borders describes the Chinese government as an "enemy of the Internet."
In its annual report in February, the global media watchdog said that China, using "armies" of cyber-police, was spearheading an increasingly sophisticated movement by repressive regimes around the world to restrict the Internet.
In a speech in January, Chinese President Hu Jintao also said that the central government intended to keep as tight a rein on the Internet as it does on traditional forms of the media such as newspapers and television.