Google has been making headlines recently over its decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, in response to attacks on its corporate infrastructure that targeted the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. Although this Google incident is a new development, Internet censorship in China has been a fact of life for years. If anything, the recent attack on Google is part of a larger trend, which started years ago and has been gathering steam since early 2008, of increased control and monitoring, both of Internet content and of China's own citizens as they get online in ever greater numbers.

The past several years have been dismal for proponents of Internet freedom in China: we've seen increasingly sophisticated censorship technology coupled with the rise of the "50 Cent Party," an army of youth who are paid 50 cents for every pro-government comment they write online; social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been banned; the restive province of Xinjiang has had no Internet service whatsoever for six months now (although the government recently allowed access to a few state-run websites); and then there was Charter 08, the web-based manifesto promoting respect for human rights and peaceful democratic reforms in China. Originally signed by 303 concerned Chinese citizens from all walks of life, Charter 08 has gone on to collect over 10,000 signatures--but all references to Charter have since been deleted from Chinese websites and a key author of Charter 08, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced on Christmas Day to eleven years in prison. [Read more]