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The other day China presented a new deal to its 538 million Internet users: Disclose your identities to your service providers, and we’ll protect your privacy from everyone else.

Acceptance is not voluntary -- rather, it’s law. But that isn’t stopping China’s editorialists, bloggers and microbloggers from openly contemplating a serious question: Can China’s raucous, muckraking Internet culture survive if the anonymous microbloggers who enervate it are forced to disclose their identities to the often state-owned entities that allow them to surf in the first place?