can you believe it?

well shit. I found this article (in bold) while searching google....it took me awhile b/c most sites that discuss it are blocked. so strange, i've never in all my time in china realized how crazy the control is. So, I've done some research and opened a new blog : http://cammie.blog-city.com. it hasn't been actually created yet, so no need to check it out. i will just keep blindly posting on blogspot until i have some time to really spruce things up. i'll let you know when the cross-over time comes. once again, email me if you want to talk. peace out.
Dozens of arrests
Ever since the Communist party took power in 1949, the Chinese media has been tightly controlled by the government. Online publishing is a real threat to that control, and the government is clearly worried. A crackdown in 2003 closed websites and internet cafes and saw the arrest of dozens of online commentators.
Yet this is not proving enough to stifle the pluck and ingenuity of China’s bloggers. The rise of the blog phenomenon was made possible by blog-hosting services. Just as companies like Yahoo host email accounts, sites like blogger.com, based in the United States, host blogs.
Blogs usually allow room for readers’ comments, and because they often contain numerous links to other blogs and websites, they each act as a unit in a dynamic community. Together they form an interconnected whole – the “blogosphere”.
When Mao and Zheng started CNBlog.org, China had 67 million internet users. Today, it has more than 90 million, and most are hungry for information. The official China Internet Network Information Center in Beijing says 62% of internet users go online primarily to read news. Internet cafes are spreading rapidly throughout China, even in rural areas, largely thanks to official efforts to promote technology and improve the country’s economic competitiveness.
Great Firewall of China
But the government also fears that uncontrolled online information will cause the regime to collapse. Since 2000 China’s police force has established internet departments in more than 700 cities and provinces.
The net police monitor websites and email for “heretical teachings or feudal superstitions” and information “harmful to the dignity or interests of the state”. Since 2002, all internet service providers have had to sign a self-censorship pledge before they can operate.
Perhaps the most effective component of government control is the “Great Firewall”, which protects the nine gateways connecting China to the global internet. Its main function is to prevent surfers in China from accessing “undesirable” web content.
Research at the Berkman Center at Harvard University has found that blocked sites include overseas Chinese-language news websites, such as BBC Chinese, and most news sites originating in Taiwan and Hong Kong; and religious and human-rights websites such as Falun Gong and Amnesty International USA.
But things were starting to change when Mao began his grass-roots publishing effort. Technology writer Fang Xingdong in Beijing, who made his name with a book criticising Microsoft’s business in China, started a news and commentary website, BlogChina.com, which covers the development of China’s IT industry.
Zero cost
Fang coined the Chinese term bo ke to mean blogger. He encouraged his readers to try blogging by registering on blogger.com. “Blogging is a true revolution,” he wrote. “One needs zero technology training, zero institution and zero cost to become a blogger.”
By January 2003, China had about 2000 bloggers when, without warning, the Chinese government blocked all access to blogspot.com, the server that hosts all blogs registered on blogger.com.
The net police do not make the reasons for such actions public, but Chinese bloggers point out that DynaWeb, an anti-censorship service run by overseas Chinese, had been using a blog on blogspot.com to publish proxy server addresses that allowed users to get around the Great Firewall. The authorities’ blanket blockade affected all China’s bloggers, leaving them suddenly unable to reach their journals.
The censors probably did not anticipate the bloggers’ response. For many, blogging had become an addictive activity. With nowhere else to go, many followed Mao’s lead and started to look for solutions inside China.
Three small start-ups offered them a refuge; Blogcn.com, Blogdriver.com and Blogbus.com. All were blog-hosting services started just a couple of months earlier by people who had first gathered on Mao’s website. All were based inside China, and inside the Great Firewall.
Banning “truth”
At first, the new companies attracted little attention from the government. In early 2003, most Chinese who wanted to comment online were using not blogs, but online forums like bulletin boards and chat rooms. These allowed people to express themselves anonymously and therefore safely, and were already beginning to have a social impact.
But there is a catch. Whether in China or elsewhere, such sites are usually moderated by editors who keep them relevant and readable. In China, the moderators also keep their sites’ content acceptable to the censor, so when users try to post a “forbidden” comment they receive a warning message such as “your post contains sensitive and indecent contents”.
Posts on politically sensitive topics, such as Falun Gong, human rights, democracy, and Taiwan independence, are routinely filtered by this means. A list recently obtained by the China Internet Project in Berkeley found that over 1000 words, including “dictatorship”, “truth”, and “riot police” are automatically banned in China’s online forums.
This type of censorship is part of the wider internet crackdown that intensified in 2003. Dozens of people who published politically provocative articles online were arrested.
The net police closed almost half of the country’s 200,000 internet cafes, and installed surveillance software in the rest. In Liaoning province, where 40% of the people who go online do so in internet cafes, software was installed in 7000 cafes to track track web users’ online movements and keep records of their names, addresses and ID numbers.