China Is Losing a War Over InternetBeijing Has Prevailed in Battles, but Segment of Society Has Awakened to the Constraints
By Loretta Chao and Jason Dean, The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2009
BEIJING — These appear to be dark days for the Internet in China.
Four months into a crusade against Internet pornography, the government is closing thousands of sites—some pornographic, some not—and tightening rules on who can register Web addresses inside China.
Foreign sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, blocked by censors in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule on Oct. 1, remain inaccessible to most Chinese users. Several prominent critics of the state who used the Internet to spread their message have been detained or imprisoned.
Yet this list of casualties obscures a larger truth: The censors are losing. ...
The censors "are winning the battles everywhere," says Isaac Mao, a blogging pioneer based in China and Chinese-Internet researcher, "but losing the war." ...
~ Full Story here
