From MediaShift (link):
When Google launched its web search engine in China, and admitted having to censor search results, we made a big stink about it here in the U.S. And when Microsoft admitted to censoring its MSN Spaces blogs in China, we made a big stink about it. And when any American technology company was found to have collaborated with the Chinese government in censoring the Internet, we made a big stink.
Freedom of speech online is an important ideal, but perhaps we are inserting our own Western societal norms on an Eastern culture that has different needs and desires. And perhaps we aren’t giving enough credit to the Netizens of China to figure out how to get around the censorship of the vaunted Great Firewall of China , the state’s centralized control of Internet content.