around the blogosphere:  Chinese citizens are climbing the Great Firewall to read the Twitter posts of an adult film star... The Falun Gong may be banned in China, but followers are finding ways to spread the word that the CCP kills Falun Gong members and harvests their organs... A Renmin University graduate created a stir when he attended a presentation by Yunnan's Propaganda Bureau and threw 30RMB worth of fifty cent notes (wu mao) at the presenter (English translation here).

Rumors that Google may pull out of China has thrown the state of the Chinese Internet into sharp focus. It says much about the disconnect between the idealism of the Internet pioneers and the reality of how the Internet is utilized in undemocratic states.

During the 1990s, we were told that the Internet was going to single-handedly topple totalitarianism throughout the globe. Regimes would no longer be able to control the free global flow of information to repressed citizens, and knowledge would be power enough to squeeze the dictators out. Everything the optimists said about the Internet is true: unfettered access does have the power to liberalize less than undemocratic public spheres. But it's getting to that free and unfettered version of the Internet that's the problem these days. And the authoritarians -- most notably China and Iran, but others too, like Vietnam -- have been amazingly adept at filtering out what they don't want people to hear. Normally we don't think of business interests in China overlapping with human rights, but in the case of American technology companies, the two camps are, and will continue to be, more closely aligned than we might think. (Read more after the jump)

Six weeks ago, Chinese Twitter micro-bloggers made a quite a splash on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall through the online Berlin Twitterwall.  It was reported by October 29 that over 1,500 Tweets had been scrawled in Chinese across the site, most drawing apt parallels between the Berlin Wall and the "Great Firewall" of China.  The remarkable twist of this story was that these Chinese commenters "scaled" that very same cyber-wall to make their thousands of protests - Twitter has long been banned in China.  

Yet Chinese Twitter users are a growing presence on the popular micro-blogging platform, as we discovered firsthand.  During our ten-day campaign  protesting the continued imprisonment of Chinese writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo, of the 395 Tweets and Followers collected by our Twitter petition, 337 were in Chinese.  (Read more after the jump)