Dog owner takes on web censors

Beijing: Outraged that his internet posting about dogs had been banned, Chen Yuhua wrote to the mayor of Beijing. No answer. He wrote to the city council. Still no answer. When all else failed, he consulted a lawyer, studied China's civil code and marched into court with a lawsuit.

"I was very careful to follow the correct procedure," Chen said, pointing at the official legal manual on his dining room table.

Chen's suit, filed on November 26, was a bold challenge to the legal authority of the Communist Party to decide what China's 1.3 billion people can say and read on their computers.

It was also a sign that, beneath the ever more prosperous surface, some of China's educated elite may be growing impatient with a one-party authoritarian system in which anonymous bureaucrats decide what movies, plays, novels or social commentaries are safe enough for public consumption.

Unreasonable

Chen's posting was an attack on the Beijing municipal government's regulations barring any dog over 14 inches high and restricting each family to only one dog. These rules are unreasonable and are enforced arbitrarily, he contended in his essay. "It is so funny that people may have a 35-centimetre-high dog but may not have a 36-centimetre-high dog," he said.

To back up his contention, Chen, 65, cited President Hu Jintao demanding at the party's 17th National Congress in October that China follow the path of "scientific development" and make government more transparent.

"What they do is not scientific," Chen said, denouncing Beijing's rules restricting dog ownership.