Chinese censhorshop of the internet had been going on for a while now, but recently, it has been getting a whole lot of attention since big companies (google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ...) are getting behind it.
I have been reading news stories for a few years about how China censors its internet searches, in particular, searches with those "key words" descibed in the slide show.
Last July, I went to China (Beijing, Xian, Shanghai), and a brought a laptop. Since we stayed in a nice hotel that catered to international (American and other countries) travelers, it had an ethernet connection in the room. Since I was feeling a bit daring, I decided I would test out their censorship system and posted a message on another forum and sent a few emails. I used key words like "democracy", "freedom", "protest".
As you can see, I am still alive and well, no Chinese storm troopers broke down my door and arrested me. All the while, right by the ethernet plug i nthe room, there was a sign which said something to the effect of, "Please respect the wishes of the People's Republic of Chine while browsing the internet", with a picture of Chairman Mao next to it.
Then again, you would expect that they wouldn't be leaning too hard on American tourists. On the other hand, I walked by an "internet cafe" in Xian, in a rather poor part of town. Looking into the dark room with computer screens in it, you just know that is where all the restrictions are.
I saw a news story more recently, back when google decided to join forces with China, in which this site,
http://www.baidu.com/index.html
was advertized as the chinese version of google (as opposed to http://www.google.cn/) . If you search for common words like "cat" or "dog", everything works fine, even if you search for their equivilents in chinese characters ("猫", "狗"). But when you search for "民主", you always get a "page cannot be displayed" error. Is it a coincidency that whenever I try to seach for "democracy" in chinese, it never works for me? I think not.