From your link: "All sites hosted on a server in the Chinese mainland must, by law, apply for and receive one of these babies [an ICP License] before their site

From your link: "All sites hosted on a server in the Chinese mainland must, by law, apply for and receive one of these babies [an ICP License] before their site goes live, a rule enforced at the hosting level." The West doesn't require websites to display their licence number in their footers. They don't require printing presses to be registered with the government. True there's widespread surveillance, but there's no official and intrusive "great firewall": encrypted connections aren't throttled, there isn't widespread use of proxies just to simply _access_ popular sites in other countries. You can use whatever VPN you like in the West. Western movies are routinely banned in China, whereas I can't find a single example of a Chinese movie being banned in the Western world. Are you seriously making the claim that censorship in the West is literally at the same level as it in China? Because that's all I've said isn't true. I'm not saying that the West doesn't censor or propagandize, I'm saying that it (at least so far) hasn't engaged in to the same degree. I'm as angry at the media and the government surveillance in the West as anyone, but hyperbole does nothing to further the debate.