THAT

It must be that time of the month. Like clockwork, it's time again for the seemingly obligatory post describing the Chinese government's latest attempt to censor YouTube The row this time is over a video , released by the exiled Tibetan government, depicting Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after riots last year in Lhasa. Normally, China will censor individual videos, but this time it decided to apparently block the entire YouTube website. As I've described before , the so-called "Great Firewall of China" works so well because it's extremely subtle. Rather than outright censoring websites, it simply makes specific pages take too long to load, so users wind up going to different destinations out of impatience. From my own analysis of the Great Firewall performed while in China, I can attest to the fact that most people never even know when a site is being censored. Contrary to American perceptions, Chinese users never receive some ominous warning that the police are coming to get them for visiting a banned site. They just grow impatient with the loading time, and move on with their lives.This is a recurring story that always gets lots of coverage in the blogosphere, and while it's important for citizen journalists to act as watchdogs and report such happenings, the real story lies in whether Google (which owns YouTube) chooses to remove the controversial video in order to appease a Chinese government with whom it wants to conduct business, or, conversely, whether Google will leave the video in place, sticking to its stated principle to "Do No Evil".Bloggers ought to follow-up onstory.