"Soldiers cannot open blogs on the Internet no matter (whether) he or she does it in the capacity of a soldier or not," Xinhua news agency quoted Wan Long, a political commissar of the People's Liberation Army, as saying.

"The Internet is complicated and we should guard against online traps," it said, citing concerns about military "confidentiality".

The new rules are laid out in revised PLA Internal Administration Regulations and went into effect on June 15, the report said. They ban soldiers of the PLA, the world's largest standing army, from creating homepages, web sites or blogging.

China operates a vast system of web censorship, sometimes referred to as the "Great Firewall," that blocks access to or censors content deemed unacceptable, ranging from pornography to political dissent.

Earlier this month, the government cited state security as it defended its right to censor the Internet and warned other nations to respect how it polices the world's largest online population of 400 million web users.

At the same time, the government insisted it "guarantees the citizen's freedom of speech on the Internet as well as the public's right to know, to participate, to be heard and to oversee".

The latest moves come after a very public row with Google over web freedoms earlier this year that prompted the US Internet giant to shut its Chinese search engine.

The spat over censorship and cyberattacks touched off a war of words with the United States, at a time when ties were already suffering due to US arms sales to Taiwan and trade and currency issues.

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