NAILENE CHOU WIEST in Beijing

Students at Beijing's Tsinghua University staged a low-key protest yesterday against new restrictions on its internet chat room, which has been blocked to off-campus visitors.

The move, announced on Wednesday, sparked protests from former and current students, who said their freedom of expression on the Shuimu Tsinghua website - at www.smth.org - had been drastically curtailed.

From noon yesterday, students put strings of paper cranes and flowers on a sun dial near the university's eastern gate, where a sign reading "Give me back Shuimu" was hung above the school motto, "Deeds are better than words".

A number of university officials watched the students but did not stop the protest.

Off-campus visitors, notably former students, had been frequent visitors to the chat room.

The Ministry of Information Industry issued a regulation requiring all non-profit activities on the internet to be registered, effective from tomorrow. It will force all users to register under their true identity.

But students blamed Education Minister Zhou Ji for depriving them of free speech. Mr Zhou, a mechanical engineer by training, has sounded alarm over the Web's influence on young people.

Mr Zhou noted in a recent speech that the internet had more influence on mainland students, who tended to believe what they read on the internet more than young people overseas.

He concluded: "Therefore, the Communist Party Central Committee highlights the strengthening and improving of political thought education of students as an urgent and important task."

Following the example of Tsinghua, other universities quickly blocked outside access to their chat rooms. Internet surfers yesterday found access was blocked to chat rooms at Peking University and Fudan University in Shanghai, among others.