By Diane Stormont

HONG KONG, Jan 17 (Reuter) - China has announced a clampdown on economic news but it faces a daunting task in trying to control the spread of information, analysts said on Wednesday.

They said that Hong Kong's pro-democracy activists have proven this point in the past.

"It is almost impossible to put a seal on information entering a country," said Brian Jeffries, editor and publisher of industry publication AsiaPacific Space Report.

In 1989, pro-democracy activists relied on faxes to spread the word throughout China about the bloody Tiananmen crackdown, countering China's official version of the June 4 killings on the streets of Beijing.

A cheap and fast way of transmitting Chinese characters, the fax remains the information distributor of choice for activists in Hong Kong and beyond.

Labour activists, supporters of Tibetan independence and pro-democracy advocates rely on a fax machine and telephone line to beam information into China.

Today the Hong Kong Alliance, the pro-democracy group which sponsored the fax-a-fact campaign into China in 1989, also uses the Internet to spread the word.

Beijing's announcement on Tuesday that it would impose curbs on the flow of economic information in China has nevertheless sent a chill through the British colony, where confidence is low just 18 months before the transition to Beijing's rule.

Citing national security, Beijing ordered all international information vendors to submit to regulation by the Communist Party's Xinhua news agency, empowering the government to censor even economic news deemed to be an attack on China.

But China's economic takeoff is beginning to put satellite and computer technology within the grasp of more of its information-hungry people -- and there appears little that Beijing can do now to stem the rising tide of information washing into the country.

Jeffries said over a dozen satellites were beaming data into China, and he noted Chinese campaigns to clamp down on satellite dishes in the past had proved impossible to police.

Other analysts said that the Internet now transmits millions, perhaps billions, of pages of information on China, much of it in Chinese, all around the world.

In Hong Kong, home to about 40 Internet providers, a quick trawl through a couple of Internet directories on Wednesday revealed thousands of China-related documents, including a string of newspapers and magazines in Chinese published in Hong Kong, Taiwan and by Chinese organisations in the West.

A click of the mouse brought up Taipei's view -- the Taiwan Central News Agency. Another displayed Hong Kong's Sing Tao newspaper group publications in English and Chinese.

The Hong Kong government has several pages as do the colony's political parties. Amnesty International has a page dedicated to human rights abuses in China.

For economic information, stockbrokers Jardine Fleming and Dharmala Securities disseminate facts and figures on Hong Kong and China's stock markets.

Few Hong Kong people believe China could, even if it tried, impose a news blackout on the colony after the 1997 handover.

But even an attempt to impose controls on information flow hits at the very heart of Hong Kong's confidence, politicians said. That could threaten the territory's prosperity and Western-style freedoms, they added.

"It (the curb) may or may not be applied to Hong Kong after 1997 but if it does, forget it, this is the end," said legislator Emily Lau, a former journalist.

REUTER