A face-saving compromise on the Olympic internet

Hu Jintao stepped in
via Wikipedia"May you be living in interesting times" has wrongly be used as a untrue cliche by journalists while writing about China, says Ogilvy internet guru Kaiser Kuo in his guide for foreign journalists visiting the Beijing Olympics. But watching the brawl regarding the free access of internet at the Beijing Olympics, leaving especially the IOC in a rather familiar Chinese mess, where it first said to be taken by surprise by the Chinese censorship on the internet during the Olympics, then said it had a deal with the Chinese organizers and then decided it never had a deal after all.
The issue had already become rather touchy for individual high-level members of the IOC, who were being scrutinized, for example the Dutch crown prince Willem-Alexander, whose position was being challenged in Dutch parliament.
But the IOC and the thousands of foreign journalists in Beijing were just a sideshow in a major internal battle between Chinese bureaucracies, in this case the BOCOG and the alliance of government departments in charge of the internet. BOCOG seemed yesterday to be losing that battle, as the central government stepped in and brokered a compromise between both parties. It was a typical Chinese compromise, trying to keep all bureaucratic powerbrokers happy. Denouncing either party would create so many enemies in the Chinese bureacuracy that had to get even in the future, the central government could not afford either party to lose face.
So, the Chinese censorship was upheld: it did not waiver on the basic principle that China would decide what websites to block or to filter anything it did not like. But the compromise would be that larger numbers of websites that were still blocked, would be unblocked, allowing foreign journalists to download their own copy of the reports of Amnesty International. After the deal was brokered, foreign correspondents got even the chance to meet Party Secretary Hu Jintao, who tried to calm down the temper among the foreign press corps?
Will this Chinese compromise satisfy also the foreign critics? Most likely not. Part of the internet will remain blocked, although at this stage everybody is still poking around to see whether they can or cannot get through to the Falun Gong sites. My estimate: they won't. But very soon the games itself will begin, making this brawl at best a historical footnote in the media history.