China's ban of online publication China Development Brief amounts to “growing censorship of socio-economic news, preventing any reliable assessment of the real state of the country” the group Reporters Without Borders stated Thursday.

The Beijing Statistics Bureau and Public Security Bureau ordered Nick Young, the site's founder, to stop publication July 4. Because the server is British, they could not order the site's closure, but told Young publishing any further is “illegal.”

The Brief, based in Beijing, www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com, has both Chinese and English versions. Its bi-monthly newsletter counts the World Bank, UN agencies and several NGOs as subscribers, and since it was founded in 1995, has become a major source of information on China's development.