Peter Ford reports in the Christian Science Monitor:
Though China is home to nearly 300 million Internauts, more than anywhere else, “the country’s Internet environment remains one of the most controlled in the world,” says the report by Freedom House (PDF), a New York-based human rights group.
Blocking foreign websites is a common tactic: YouTube has been inaccessible for most of the past week, since Tibetan exiles posted a film showing Chinese militarized policemen savagely beating Tibetan monks and civilians. The video-sharing site has been blocked before.
… Still, netizens are constantly finding ways around censorship, pushing the envelope on what is tolerated, and making the Internet “a primary source of news and a forum for discussion for many Chinese,” the Freedom House report says.
“Netizens’ energy is always there,” says Xiao Qiang, editor of China Digital Times, which monitors the Chinese web. “It’s like a river; you can block it in one place and it flows somewhere else.”
