I'm the go-to girl for Chinese blogging

Because I've been following the developments somewhat closely, I thought I'd share yet another update about China's censorship of bloggers and messages on MSN Spaces. Wired magazine yesterday posted a dispatch containing an interview with one of China's first bloggers, who calls Microsoft "evil," and has these kind words to say:

"Internet users know what's evil and what's not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese bloggers."

Mao offers a unique perspective on the issue (one that hasn't yet been heard in stories I've seen). You may recall that Microsoft's defense has been that it's just following local practices in banning such words as "democracy" from its Web portal. Mao and Wired point out that no, it's not actually local practice to ban these words from blogs and e-mails:

Existing Chinese blog-hosting companies ... [police] their members' blogs for postings that might get the company and its users in trouble: The phrase "China needs democracy," for example, would set off a red flag. But "democracy" itself is not a dirty word, says Mao. Likewise, text about human rights abuses outside of China is not banned.

I first started following this story here because I was worried about Microsoft finally coming up with a filtering software that works and bringing it back over here, thus creating the dream product for many "protect the kiddies" legislators.

But now I'm wondering what effect this expanding story will have on our own politicians. Will someone seize on it as another example of China's blatant censorship? Will they ignore it in favor of promoting trade relations with the huge Chinese population?

As the story veers away from our class discussion, I'm probably going to stop following it here (and I'm going to post an on-topic message in a bit), but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I hope it does for you, too.