internet - The emerging power of the online debate

Yang Guobing gives a thorough (academic) overview of the emerging power of the online networks in China. (I believe Rebecca MacKinnon pointed here, but I lost the original link).

Since the popularization of the Internet in China in 1998 [1], not a year has passed without some influential cases of Internet–mediated activism. In the same period, an entire apparatus of Internet control has shaped up in China. It almost seems as if there existed a symbiotic relationship between control and resistance. In no other nation is this paradoxical situation more apparent than in China today.