Chinese Press Control: You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat It.

The biggest mystery behind China's repeated attacks on foreign media has always been why do they bother?  It's understandable that the BBC's Chinese language news service would be blocked, as well as other overseas Chinese news sites, but to block an English language site seems pretty pointless.

Joshua Keating at Slate makes the point that state-controlled media in China vastly out-numbers foreign news sources, and that Chinese people aren't too bothered about reading news in English anyway.   Any trip down any street in Beijing will take you past a newspaper vendor who seems to have an unimaginably wide range of publications.  In spite of efforts to improve the levels of English literacy in the country, there's still a relatively small proportion of the Chinese population that is actually able to read English news site without the aid of a dictionary.

So what's the deal with wailing on foreign press?