Pretty striking. While it's not news that the Chinese government censors the internet, it shows how uncontroversial it is that officials would actually brag about how much content they're censoring. (Via the FT)

In China, most bureaucracies wrap up the year with long, numbers-heavy statements on how well they did the past year, and the propaganda department is no different.

Last year, “by November, […] 350m pieces of harmful information, including text, pictures and videos, had been deleted,” he said. “There was a notable improvement in the online cultural environment.” This doesn't include sites that are blocked like Facebook.

Efforts by Google and the US government and others to get the Chinese government to loosen its grip on the internet a little bit are pretty much doomed, at least in the short term.