This started very soon after the Google blog post, as per Chinese users of Twitter.
Keeping the discussion at a business level I would think would be the most productive. I don't see how throwing politics into it is going to help the situation.
Still, sad to see the once-great China, who gave us paper, movable type, gunpowder, the compass, and too many other world-changing inventions to name here, devolving into a dystopian nation of bean-counting surveillance monkeys. A great society (and I am not implying that America and the West are "great" in this sense) does not police private communications between adults in order to detect the use of lewd or subversive words...period. Such behavior is symptomatic of a system of government that is rotten to its core.
I'd give you two upvotes if I could.
UK has surveillance cameras everywhere. Echelon monitors all phones, email, fax, cell calls. China is only catching up to us. What's your point?
>The Southern Metropolis newspaper said a man from the southern city of Dongguan recently had his phone blocked. China Mobile’s customer service told him their computers had detected lewd words in his messages and that he would have to take his identity card to the police to reactivate the phone.
The west is monitoring, which is a problem, but China goes further by, as the above text shows, disrupting communication.
.. probably it has _always_ been doing that.
No doubt the monitoring has been in place for a long time. It seems the real news is an uptick in shutting off service and requiring IDs and written promises to get service reinstated.