It's shocking yet sad to read this line from a Chinese student in Hong Kong, "Free access to information is a need and a privilege." With the strictly censoring of information in China, this represents lots of other Chinese students either now studying abroad or studying in Hong Kong.
How free the media in China is? 'China's constitution affords its citizens freedom of speech and press, but the document contains broad language that says Chinese citizens must defend "the security, honor, and interests of the motherland."' Which means anything the government thinks would offend to what has been mentioned above will be blocked by its firewall. What happens to those aren't blocked but then considered to violate the regulation? Fine, closing news outlet, imprisonment, self-censorship would be faced. Words like protests, environmental disasters, Tibet, and Taiwan will be filtered and maybe blocked.
Information is relatively limited. No wonder there’s often a big difference between Chinese people and people from other cultures. I think with the closed information flow, it’s so hard for them to know about what is going on outside their soil. Digital divide will happen due to being rich or not. However, even with the light year speed of developing in China societies, the censorship from the Government is slowly draining the public’s brains.
further reading:
Media censorship in China. http://www.cfr.org/publication/11515
China's censorship could lead to a brain drain. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/03/hong.kong.students.google/
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