From The Australian (link):
One of China’s best-known dissidents, Liu Xiaobo – a former university lecturer jailed for 10 years following the 1989 protests – told The Australian: “The authorities started by tightening control on the newspapers, including the Beijing News and China Youth Daily, and are now extending that campaign online. As a result, Hotmail is hardly working, and Yahoo is increasingly hard to access.”
Why the crackdown then? Liu says: “Fear. They are afraid of the sharpening social contradictions, afraid that freedom of opinion will threaten their rule. They have been tightening access to the internet since 2004, but this can’t last for ever.
“Society is changing, nobody is supporting this wholeheartedly, even people in the central propaganda department. They are aware they have no moral grounds for what they do – for which there is a Chinese phrase for ‘dirty tricks’ – so they just make calls or leave instructions, or attack the internet.”
