If anyone wonders whether the Chinese government has tightened its grip on electronic communications since protests began engulfing the Arab world, Shakespeare may prove instructive.
A Beijing entrepreneur, discussing restaurant choices with his fiancee over their cellphones last week, quoted Queen Gertrude?s response to Hamlet: ?The lady doth protest too much, methinks.? The second time he said the word ?protest?, her phone cut off. He spoke English, but another caller, repeating the same phrase on Monday in Chinese over a different phone, was also cut off in mid-sentence.
A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, email and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of anti-government sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterises electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the cat is getting bigger, especially since revolts began to ricochet through the West Asia and North Africa, and homegrown efforts to organise protests in China began to circulate on the Internet about a month ago.
?The hardliners have won the field, and now we are seeing exactly how they want to run the place,? said Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing analyst of China?s leadership.
On Sunday, Google accused China of disrupting its Gmail service in the country and making it appear as a technical problems.