China censors Flickr: 'Great Firewall'

China has a major department geared towards the censoring of news and internet content. It is difficult for people in open societies to believe this, but China's restriction of individual rights extends onto the internet, and its citizens are starting to squeal about this. Not too loudly, because there is a Chinese proverb, 'The tallest tree in the forest is the first to be cut down', and no one wants to be identified as the one protesting the most, but there is dissent at the blockage of famous sites also.
For example, suppose a famous photo site also has photos of the Tienanmen Square massacre or other such incidents, then the people running the Chinese firewalls can actually block the whole site. No matter if this site is also the way to exchange photos among friends. And this is actually what has happened, with the photo sharing site Flickr coming under the keen gaze of Chinese censors because of people placing Chinese dissident type photos over there, and oh my, such things cannot be allowed to be shown to gullible Chinese citizens; what happens if they suddenly develop tendencies towards political freedom and openness. Refer this news:

Yang's fury erupted a few days ago when he found he could not browse his friend's holiday snaps on Flickr.com, due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing Web site. "Once you've complained all you can to your friends, what more can you do? What else is there but anger and disillusionment?" Yang said after venting his anger with friends at a hot-pot restaurant in Beijing.
The blocking of Flickr is the latest casualty of China's ongoing battle to control its sprawling Internet. Wikipedia and a raft of other popular Web sites, discussion boards and blogs have already fallen victim to the country's censors. China employs a complex system of filters and an army of tens of thousands of human monitors to survey the country's 140 million Internet users' surfing habits and surgically clip sensitive content from in front of their eyes.

It is an ever going battle between the censors and the people trying to evade the censors. Hence, steps on how to bypass the censors and see these 'banned' site are also very popular among the Chinese. But this is a battle that will take some time to mature, as the internet pushing crowd is also a beneficiary of economic reforms and is unlikely to push very hard for political reform, especially when they know the likely consequence of 'activities against the state'. And China is not alone in this, there are a host of other countries that have tried to censor the internet such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and even a democracy like India (censored Blogger for some time).
In addition, due to the lure of working with the Chinese Government, even large corporations such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft cooperate with the Chinese government in these censorship attempts.