Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor reports on recent crackdowns and the tightening of government control in China:
Chinese political reformers, who had hoped for a more relaxed atmosphere after the 2008 Olympic Games went well, have been disappointed.
“Things are going backwards,” complains Hu Xingdou, the economics professor whose website was closed last month because local Internet censors in the city of Suzhou, near Shanghai, suddenly objected to articles that had been up on the site for more than a year without causing a stir.
“I hope that what’s been happening is related to 2009, and that we won’t continue to slide backwards in the future,” he adds.