internet - China's 125 million censors

Trying to catch up with a lot of lose ends I have missed on in the past few days. As so often, when media write about the internet in China, much censorship was in the air. A nice piece at Danwei by Ann Condi, who is meeting a wall of apathy when she tries to explain her Chinese students the benefits of using a proxy to go around the IP-blocks.

Those outside of China often imagine hordes of Internet savvy Chinese Web surfers scouring the Internet for cracks in the Great Firewall, avidly downloading precious snippets of information blocked by the government to disseminate among the circle of politically-aware Chinese cybernauts. The hope is that the Internet is having a transformative effect on China by allowing The Truth – or at least some essential truths – to seep into this tightly controlled information environment. And surely (the assumption goes) the vanguard in this process of “peaceful evolution” would be young, English-speaking urban professionals.
This image is largely a myth.

Andrew Lih ponders about the issue and he does not think the censor has such a big influence on people's surfing activities.

Consider this: American web surfers have a completely unfiltered Internet, but they’re mainly using email, Youtube, Myspace, sports, entertainment and news sites. Being free of technical censorship, however, does not necessarily make for an informed populace.
Americans are oblivious to similar historical ulcers, like the illegal annexation of Hawaii and overthrow of the monarchy by rich American businessmen backed by the US military.

And Andrew comes with many more examples that illustrate that censorship is not a technical issue, but one that has more cultural and social connotations. As an article in The Economist illustrates, here kindly reproduced by the China Digital Times, the technical tools to circumvent the Great Firewall are available in large numbers, if people only wanted to use them.
That makes you wonder why in Canada they make such a big fuzz about Psiphon, the news tool for circumventing the censor. It simple does not add any value.
Also the urban myth, repeated wrongly by The Economist, that China has 30,000 police officers surfing the Net does not help. If China has a problem, and as we see in Condi's piece very few Chinese share that idea, it is that it has 125 million censors. All internet users censor themselves to a certain degree, problably also those outside China.