Contradictory views on censorship

I met a participant at the 7th World Media Economics Conference and got a taste of the Chinese people's contradictory views on censorship.

This person told me that the Chinese government has been blocking hotmail accounts for the last several weeks. To check e-mail, the person had to telephone a relative who lives in another Chinese speaking region and have the relative retrieve recent messages.

Naturally this person was annoyed and expressed much happiness at the government's control of Internet communications.

But later as we talked about current economic conditions in China, particularly the huge gap between rich and poor, this person told me that the Chinese government was right to control the press.

Beijing apparently is sitting on a huge real estate bubble that the government is planning to burst. But instead of allowing "free market" reporting about overinvestment in real estate, the government would rather handle the situation by putting out broad hints through Chinese newspapers.

These hints are in the form of articles suggesting that local residents wait a few months before purchasing property. Recent headlines include these:

Property outlook turns doubtful
Rising prices see owners become a 'housing slave'
Irrational exuberance in Beijing's housing market

The conference participant defended this approach, saying that the Western style reporting would set off a panic, driving prices sharply lower and causing deep losses.

The Chinese approach was better, I was told, because it gave people a clear signal of what to expect and plenty of warning to prepare for the coming bubble bursting.