One of the things I love about China is that they set high goals, as in "Let's build a wall around the entire country" and more recently "Let's have Internet access but without the part where people can access the Internet."

If you know the history of the Great Wall, it was highly successful in keeping out animals. But invading armies just bribed the guards and walked through the gate. ... Something tells me that blocking all the unacceptable content on the Internet will be about as effective as the Great Wall.

On 4 June this year, a strange incident occurred. In Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan, a city with a population of 11 million, the small-ads pages of an evening newspaper contained a short item that read: "Salute to the steadfast mothers of the 4 June victims". The entry was noticed by some readers, scanned and uploaded onto the internet, where it rapidly circulated. The authorities jumped to investigate. Within days, three of the paper's editors had been fired. How had the wall of silence been breached? The girl in charge of the small ads, born in the 1980s, had called the number given by the person who placed the ad to ask what the date referred to. Told it was a mining disaster, she cleared it. No one had ever spoken to her about 1989. Censorship devours its own children.

So the bloggers are trying out new methods to evade Chinese government censors - the latest one is they are using tools and software to write backwards. Or write vertically instead of horizontally. This is apparently confusing the censors because they now cannot automatically track "objectionable phrases" (aw my heart bleeds for them). One such "text flipping" tool is here. Obviously the government will eventually find a way around it but the resourceful bloggers will probably have found another solution by then and will have moved on.

Again, as with the Great Usenet Purge of 2008, it's hard to defend against censorship when officials hide behind things like child pornography and terrorism. No one wants to be seen as being "soft" on such topics, and the nuance required to successfully argue against this type of censorship is often difficult to articulate in a media environment of 60-second sound bites and screaming Drudge sirens.