The hard thing to bend my mind around is the fact that many people in China are in favour of Internet censorship. I have witnessed the same thing here in the UAE - even from young Western-educated locals.

I suppose that if you grow up in a society where heavy-handed censorship is widespread in all media and even conversation, you'd accept it as normal and perhaps necessary. Self-censorship is even more effective and omni-present.

Note: I'm not claiming that censorship is absent in the West, but you'd be silly not to acknowledge that there's less of it.

One local told me that he wouldn't dream of giving an unfiltered Internet connection to many of his countrymen, as nothing in their culture has prepared them to deal with what they'd run into. Of course, he himself uses a VPN to dial out.