The Online Journalism Review has published comments by a roundtable of experts talking about the state of blogging in China:
Good news and bad news come intertwined in China, especially in its online world protected by the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield — technological attempts to control what’s said and viewed on the Internet.
The recent bad news that the Chinese government is requiring all bloggers to register with the government by June 30 or face shutdown was tempered by the fact that there’s always another free blog host somewhere in the world that’s less controlled. And when word leaked out that the new Microsoft joint venture in China running MSN Spaces was censoring words such as “freedom” and “democracy” from blog titles, it didn’t take long before Peacefire and the Committee to Protect Bloggers had a simple work-around to use those words.
The forces to fight censorship and government control around the globe are finding an increasingly more vocal and effective counter-effort to circumvent filtering and blocking.
