Isaac Mao, 36, of Shanghai, credited as China's first blogger, began using the term Great Firewall in 2005 to describe the frustrating structure of internet blocks and filters imposed by a government determined to move its censor-ship system into the digital age, and keep the world out. He was a pioneer in using proxy server technology to access overseas websites. But while Western attention focuses on how much international content China still blocks, Mr Mao is excited by what has recently happened. His verdict: blogging has given Chinese people nerve.

"Two years ago nobody would have believed this was true," Mr Mao says. But "as more and more social problems have emerged in China, people have had the chance to connect and share things that could not be seen before. Once there are enough bloggers nothing can be hidden." The number of bloggers in China doubled to 107 million in the six months to last June, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre. Total users rose 56 per cent from the previous year, to 253 million, giving China the largest online population in the world. Mr Mao says he can see a tipping point coming. He believes that as a result of blogging, young Chinese brainwashed by their education system are now trying to think for themselves, work together and find smarter solutions.

"The reason many people still don't care about political change is that they don't trust each other. It's the legacy of the Cul-tural Revolution. So they don't talk to their neighbours about community issues, they don't talk about urban issues." But people are now trusting and sharing online, not always in public, but through social networking, which he says is difficult for the authorities to track. "The tipping point is everyone being able to talk about sensitive things, and wanting to talk about it, and nobody being punished."

While bloggers continue to be blocked and jailed, Mr Mao says this is failing to deter them. The sheer number of Chinese now blogging about minor matters, "puts the burden on the Government to try to check and monitor so much content. They can't tell what is sensitive". He thinks freedom of expression is as much about simple daily stories as it is about topics such as Tibet. He talks about democracy but does not see himself as a troublemaker. "I support a lot of civic rights lawyers and activists technically and help them build websites and blogs … It's really important to help community development rather than directly confront or just criticise the government."

The recent fourth annual Chinese Bloggers Conference in Guangzhou canvassed citizen journalism's impact on topics ranging from the Tibetan riots to the melamine food safety scandal. An editor at one of the new, independent magazines trying to push journalistic boundaries said that if privately owned media were the foot soldiers in the march towards free speech, bloggers were guerillas - and the Chinese Government did not know how to fight a guerilla war.

The guerilla comparison can sometimes be literal. Mr Mao says a group of bloggers sympathetic to Zeng Jinyan, wife of the jailed AIDS activist Hu Jia, and his baby daughter, under house arrest in Beijing, recently "hacked the system" of their captors. They used Google Earth to map the layout of her apartment complex, tracked the position and timing of police movements, and identified their cars. One jumped the wall of the complex, hid in the garden and caught Zeng's attention with an infra-red beam from a digital camera. Under the guise of collecting milk powder for the baby, Hu Jia's mother slipped past the heavies at the front door to collect a parcel containing a mobile phone and other techno-goodies that have allowed her to "twitter", or micro-blog via phone. Mr Mao says the authorities are yet to grapple with "twitter". Mice: 1, Cat: 0.