November 9, 2003

While China's Internet monitoring system does not catch everything, it catches a lot of people complaining about the government in chat rooms or in email. Dozens of these practitioners of free speech have been arrested for "subversive activity" and some are being put on trial as an example. This policy is working, to an extent. Chinese net users are more restrained online, or are learning how to set up encrypted chat rooms and screen who gets into them.