From the Christian Science Monitor today: “China this week unveiled strict penalties for online porn distributors, but analysts see online freedom on the rise. ”
“Five years ago in China, most Western newspaper websites were blocked from viewing. Today, the Chinese censors who watch the Internet target more specific sites – chat forums on ultrasensitive topics like Tibetan liberation and the Falun Gong religious movement.
(Beijing does not actually label sites as “blocked.” Instead, when a user clicks on a blocked site, the page will begin to load, slowly, and then the user is redirected either to an error message or back to a Chinese search engine.)
So while the average Chinese still can’t walk into an Internet cafe in Ningbo and pull up the homepage of the Taiwan government, he can read The New York Times.
Even some sensitive topics, surprisingly, are readily available in China. A quick browse through Wikipedia’s Chinese-language version for the “June 4, Tiananmen” entry offers a broad look at the Democracy movement of 1989 and its violent end. Without using any special software or proxy servers, a Chinese web user can view the famed photo of a lone man facing down tanks outside the square 15 years ago in Beijing. ”
