China Expands Program Requiring Real-Name Registration Online

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.

The official, Wang Chen, said at a news conference that registration trials in five major eastern Chinese cities would continue until wrinkles were worked out. But he said that eventually all 250 million users of microblogs, called weibos here, would have to register, beginning first 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.