• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 25, 2016

The Chinese government has taken the most drastic step yet in its renewed war against dissent, with a sweeping order to shut down all the country’s major nonstate news publications, including online publishers like Sina, Sohu, NetEase and iFeng, for violating a 2005 law that bans publishing any news gathered independently of its official news and propaganda organs.

The law has been on the books for over a decade, but remained largely unenforced until this weekend, when the news sites suddenly went dark.

Their operations were suspended by order of the Beijing Cyber Administration, a division of the official Internet regulatory authority that oversees many national publications based in Beijing. The BCA cited the original law against original reporting, and is believed to have acted with the approval of China’s all-powerful Politburo, headed by Communist Party Chairman and President Xi Jinping

Last year, the Chinese Internet regulatory threatened to shut down Sina Corp. because it was allegedly publishing false information and failing to implement official censorship. Some of the previous complaints stemmed from online platforms like Sina allowing commentators to spread supposedly untrue “rumors” in online discussion forums.

Regulators have also pointed to online platforms’ alleged failure to prohibit users sharing illicit content including pornography and endorsements of terrorism.

Its not clear whether the current ban will also be applied to any of China’s print newspapers, some of which operate independently of the government and publish original reporting, including the English-language South China Morning Post based in Hong Kong.

According to the 2005 law, all news organizations are supposed to limit themselves to content from official sources like the Xinhua news agency and People’s Daily, both closely supervised by the government’s propaganda ministry.

According to media analysts cited by The Financial Times, the online publishers may have been shut down as punishment for their extensive coverage of flooding in northern China that has killed over 100 people and caused billions of dollars in damage, including photos of dead bodies and devastation.

While government-owned news outlets are also covering the flooding, they have mostly focused on officially endorsed topics, including the bravery of soldiers fighting to contain the floods and save people from remote villages.

The online independent news blackout is just the latest in a series of moves by the government seeking to tighten controls and stamp out dissent.

In February, the government passed a sweeping law forbidding online publishing by foreign entities operating in the country.

The new rule from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television requires all entities publishing online to host all of their content on servers located in China. IT prohibits “Sino-foreign joint ventures,” “cooperative ventures,” and “foreign business units” from engaging in “network publishing services.