Our website has taken on a new look, and our forum, is attracting an increasing amount of traffic.

The ChinaDaily forum is presently the largest online English forum in China. It provides overseas Internet users who are interested in China and domestic English learners a unique platform where they can exchange views on common interests. It is a place where readers can share information, debate topics, seek understanding and forge friendships.

Just imagine it! Each day, tens of hundreds of readers, sitting before their computers from all of the world's continents and islands, browse or write at this forum. It is quite a phenomenon!

Like many, China is an open country. An open country knows its position in the world and what it looks like in the eyes of other people. This forum is open, too. By keeping it open, we all get to share our thoughts with each other. This builds mutual understanding.

It is normal that we may not agree with everything posted. Some have criticized the moderation of this forum, but others defend our stance.

One of the most prolific posters to the forum Liangzai from Sweden, says "Free speech is a right in certain countries as a general rule, with exceptions in all instances. There is a limit to free speech in every country, with hate speech, speech that incites rebellion or violence, and child porn universally rejected."

So, keeping the forum open does not mean we give up the right to oversee the content. Any threads supporting the secession of Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang or any other province from China will be thrown in the dustbin.

We are not alone in practicing censorship. Wrote another poster to the forum, American-based Matt605, "China isn't America when it comes to free speech. Sometimes America isn't America either. That I know from my personal experience posting at the New York Times forum. The New York Times invited people to share what they thought happened in the sky on the weekend that the Space Shuttle (Colombia) disintegrated. I said I thought it was shot down, and I said how it could have been done. They deleted every comment that I had ever posted to their site and deleted my screen name, too. That's far more than China Daily (website) has done, and China doesn't pretend to value free speech the same way that newspapers in America claim to value it."