China's Other Great Wall

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In addition to monitoring text messages, which internal security experts claim dissidents are increasingly relying on to organize themselves, there's also a plan under way to create a network of 100 satellites capable of visually monitoring every inch of Chinese territory by 2020. Designed to keep watch over the natural environment and monitor urban growth, the satellite network will also monitor 'various activities of society,' according to Shao Liqin, an official in the country's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Meanwhile, magazines and newspapers, still the most widely read media and the easiest to control, remain a primary target of government censors. Several leading journalists -- including Shi Tao, a former editor for the Contemporary Business News, who criticized the government's civil rights record -- have been imprisoned. And the government has banned coverage of some 50 intellectuals recently denounced in The Liberation Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, for trying to 'estrange the relationship between the party and intellectuals and between intellectuals and the masses.'

Because the Daily's list includes relatively soft critics of the government, such as rock star Cui Jian and novelist Jin Yong, many people have become even more fearful that their words will be misconstrued. 'Such self-censorship is probably the worst thing,' says Chu Tian, a journalist once associated with Southern Weekend, a newsweekly in southern Guangzhou province. The weekly's Web site was closed down in 2003 after it took on issues like homosexuality and workers' rights. 'The government has become completely arbitrary in dealing with the press,' Chu says. 'Now there is not even a line to toe. A piece might go unnoticed one day, but a similar or even milder article may get into trouble the next day. This makes people stay as close to the official position as possible.'

Still, Chu, who now runs a gay rights Web site, says that like many other journalists and activists, he's not going to be fazed by the government's latest crackdown on expression. Instead he chooses his words carefully and uses allegory and metaphor when he writes about controversial issues.

'It's like getting the Ping-Pong ball to just nick the table,' he says. 'You get to make the point, but barely. Luckily, readers have learned how to decode what we say -- to read our real feelings.'

Jehangir S. Pocha is the Beijing-based correspondent for The Boston Globe.

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