The Chinese government may have been caught flat-footed by the big Google anti-censorship announcement and the US speech on Internet freedom, but the country's leaders are making up for lost time. The US has had its chance to speak, and now it's China's turn to mount the moral high horse.

A basic message has crystallized over the last week as editors and reporters cover the basic talking points and conduct interviews with Chinese officials: there's a double standard at work, all our censorship is legal, and China had nothing to do with Google hacking.

Here are the latest developments:

Let's start teaching 'Net morality. From Reuters: "China's Education Ministry published a notice on Monday reminding schools they should be monitoring and filtering Web content, as well as teaching 'Internet morality.'"

We had nothing to do with it. China's official news agency, Xinhua, conducted an interview on Sunday with a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology spokesperson, and the government is now willing to take a tougher line against the accusations that it was somehow behind the sophisticated cyber attacks on Google and 33 other companies.

"Accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China," said the spokesperson. "We firmly opposed [sic] to that."

It's all legal. In a separate interview from Sunday, Xinhua spoke with the State Council Information Office and received the now-common defense of China's censorship: it's all legal, and therefore not a problem.

"A spokesperson with China's State Council Information Office told Xinhua in an exclusive interview, that China is regulating the Internet legally to build a more reliable, helpful information network that is beneficial to economic and social development," said the news service. That "more reliable, helpful information network" currently blocks access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, despite the fact that censorship regulations allegedly cover only "online information which incites subversion of state power, violence and terrorism or includes pornographic contents."

"China is willing to cooperate and exchange opinions on issues about Internet development and management with other countries, but opposes firmly to any defiance of Chinese laws, or intervening Chinese domestic affairs under the pretense of 'Internet management' regardless of the truth," the spokesperson said.

We don't want any trouble. If you're curious why news outlets, a group that might seem highly interested in Internet and press freedom, make little noise on the subject, one editor's perspective might help. The Qingyuan Daily, a local paper from Guangdong Province, ran a January 1 editorial from editor-in-chief Pan Wei. It concluded: "The editor-in-chief of this newspaper says: the best newspaper is one that does not cause trouble."

No more dirty text messaging. China now runs a new nationwide scanning system that attempts to crack down on dirty jokes and pornographic messages sent over SMS. This has led to some dissatisfaction in China, with its huge mobile user base, especially because the keyword scanning system officially opens up every user's text messages to government scrutiny.

One Chinese blogger notes, "Sending dirty jokes is a kind of etiquette for mobile socializing in China, and from my observations, if the person is the King of Jokes he will have a good base of friends, and a wide circle of contacts. Even if you haven’t seen them for a long time, when you do meet up it’s with a big smile, because as people get closer and closer there are numerous dirty jokes that will start to overflow in the heart and there is no way to suppress it."

"Democracy" and "freedom" simply mean "self-interest." The People's Daily newspaper is a major mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party. In today's edition, the paper blasted the US stance on Internet freedom as hypocritical. The piece, authored by "ace PD reporter He Zhenhua," points out the various legal and not-so-legal ways that the US keeps an eye on Internet activity.

"Let us look at 'network freedom' in the US: In order to resist Internet pornography, the U.S. 'Children's Internet Protection Act' [note: this is the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA] American authorities have enacted requires all public network resources to curb Internet child porn, a serious crime in the country; in order to respond to threats, Pentagon has developed a new type of troops—cyber troops, and also adopted several measures to beef up the military's cyber warfare capacity; shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the US Congress approved the Patriot Act to grant its security agencies the right to search telephone and e-mail communications in the name of anti-terrorism."

The bottom line is that US talk of Internet freedom and democracy is about "double standards" and always has been. "US self-interest [is] behind all these frequently changed or shifted means or tactics."

It's... sort of true. While refusing to equate the behavior of China and the US when it comes to the Internet, Salon writer Glenn Greenwald nonetheless agreed with the basic argument about US hypocrisy. If you want to see illegal spying in action, and with no consequences, look no further than the vast system of warrantless wiretapping that the US legalized long after the fact.

Message to Congress: grow a spine.

"It goes without saying that countries like China and Iran—along with many of our closest allies—are far more repressive of internal dissent than is the US," writes Greenwald. "But the role of the American Congress is supposed to be to check surveillance abuses by the US Government and to safeguard the privacy of American citizens inside the US Instead, they do the opposite: flamboyantly condemn transgressions by other governments (at least the ones we don't like) while enabling, empowering and protecting our own government officials and private telecoms who illegally spy within our own country."

Xinhua loves Ballmer. Piling onto the "double standards" bandwagon, a Xinhua editorial says that "the United States often gossips about other countries' policies on administering the Internet, but at the same time it takes similar measures to minimize the spread of illegal information. That shows that the United States takes a strict line with other countries, but not with itself."

But there's a voice of sanity crying in the wilderness, and his name is Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. "Noting that most countries exert some sort of control over information, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Friday his company must comply with the laws and customs of any country where it does business," writes Xinhua with approval.

Let's make it a trade issue. The First Amendment Coalition argues that censorship is a trade issue, and that the US should purse it with the World Trade Organization.

"The US can argue that China’s 'Great Firewall'—a system of filters and bottlenecks that effectively shutters the country within its own intranet—is an illegal restraint on international trade because it bars foreign companies from competing, via the Internet, in the vast Chinese market," says the group.

"WTO sanctions have teeth because they can be enforced through other countries’ raising of tariffs against Chinese exports. China in other recent trade disputes has shown it will abide by WTO rulings it disagrees with (reserving its right to request WTO rulings, to China’s benefit, in other matters). For the US government, playing the WTO card also demonstrates seriousness about curbing Chinese censorship, while confining the dispute to an international legal process and avoiding a direct confrontation with China."

US using Twitter to turn Iran into bloodbath? Another People's Daily article alleged that the Iranian dissatisfaction so evident in the wake of the recent national election has been ramped up by US cyberwar efforts. "It was America that initiated Internet warfare, using YouTube videos and Twitter micro-blog misinformation to split, incite, and sow discord between the conservative and reform factions to bring about large-scale bloodshed in Iran," said the piece.

The lighter side of censorship? It's not just Internet porn that angers the authorities; taking off one's pants on the subway is also forbidden.

The Guangzhou Subway Company has banned "no pants" rides on its subway system. "The public can't accept the act of removing pants inside subway cars, and the act will frighten some passengers, so we will forbid any such act from now on," said an official.