There has been much back and forth about the open letter from 4 lawyers to Sina.com about censorship of their blogs (I'd even flagged this post in my rss reader, LfC, so that's why I ended up buying the Sunday SCMP when I saw their article on the topic on their front page. That and the lunacy of Donald Tsang whingeing of conspiracies to make his government look bad.)

But amidst the sturm and drang a sentence from the SCMP article has been overlooked. It's a sentence based upon a follow-up interview with the lawyers. It's a sentence that led me to blog about the SCMP lead editorial (and some future rant when I have time to find my ruler on Chris Yeung's article on the op-ed page about the Chief Executive candidates) instead of this article.

Professor Xiao said Sina's censorship was tougher than the print media's.

The professors weren't protesting CCP censorship as an abstract evil. The professors seemed to understand and accept the expected boundaries of CCP censorship. It was only when blog posts that should have made it in to print in the mainland press were deleted without notice, that they started to protest Sina's actions. It was when the censorship crossed from clearly defined boundaries in to an unclear haze, that writing and decision making about what to write and the process of censorship became untenable. It was when news topics would disappear from the public dialogue like purged Soviet Politburo members from photos, that censorship became "a behavioural code on the internet" that was unacceptable.

Although a small first step of push back against the system of censorship, it only seemed like a small push back to me and one that in some way legitimises the greater system of censorship, if it was only a bit more transparent about the whys and whens and whos and whats. And that to me isn't the system I'm hoping for the Chinese people.