BEIJING

What makes the news from China is usually the bad news: the arrests, the raided churches, the blocked Internet sites, the overzealous security goons. That’s the way journalism works  we cover planes that crash, not those that land.

Yet the underlying trend in recent years is the opposite. For all the continuing repression, Chinese live far freer lives now than when I lived in Beijing in the 1980s and ’90s. Ordinary citizens can now easily travel abroad, choose their own housing and jobs, and move to whatever Chinese city they want to.

Then there is the Internet.

It’s true that the government censors critical Web sites and closes down troublesome blogs. Yet there aren’t nearly enough censors to manage the job, and many Chinese are quite adept at technological ladders over the Great Firewall of China. Objectionable posts are deleted by censors, but then are quickly reposted on 50 different platforms.

This is a cat-and-mouse game in which the spotlight is usually on the mice when they get caught: China has more Internet commentators in prison than any other country. But the larger truth is that the mice are winning this game, not the cats.