Also, I have a theory that terrorists/bakers are responsible for all the Christmas fruitcakes....
Actually, I remember reading about a theory called GUF (Grand Unified Fruitcake) that posited that there is exactly one fruitcake in existence and that it simply is given over and over.
I agree that democracy and freedom of speech will be the ultimate final goal where Chinese government pursuits. However, they are not the most important issues in China now. In order to fix that, we have to fix poor and hunger now. And the scale of governing is totally different from any other countries, since we have 1.5 billion, no other government understands how hard it is. Let me give an example in IT maybe you geeks will be easier to understand. To manage a web site with 100 visits per day is totally different than to run a web site with 1 million visits per day, geeks call it scaling, right.
You seem to imply here that it is necessary for the Chinese government to filter out search requests in order to solve the problems of poverty and hunger? It seems to me that if Chinese government officials were really interested in solving such problems, they wouldn't be spending such exorbitant resources to keep their own citizens in the dark about what they are doing.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker