Quote

So rather than face the bitter truth, China has placed severe restrictions on the Internet and enlisted America's high-tech companies as their Internet police.

China has leapfrogged into this information age, and Web users have grown very significantly, which knocked down the cost of doing the environmental transparency.

It seems pretty clear that the Internet has an important economic role to play for China as it reaches out to the rest of the world.

One thing is very clear from the chatter I see on Chinese blogs, and also from just what people in China tell me, is that Google is much more popular among China's Internet users than the United States.

Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.

The U.S. has more broadband subscribers than any country other than China. Americans rank at the top in their use of the web, and numerous studies validate that the U.S. is a global innovation powerhouse. The leading Internet and e-commerce companies are located here.

When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn't like.

The advantage of the internet is that it has taken away the charade of politics. China has heard of democracy and people know about certain concepts they wouldn't have previously.

The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.