If so, it’s not from a lack of effort. As this Howard French article points out, Hu has gone to extraordinary lengths to muzzle pesky reporters, discourage “unharmonious” Internet chatter and persecute regnegade bloggers. Yet the article’s conclusion is that the Internet tidal wave simply can’t be held back, and the government’s elaborate censorship operation is doomed to failure. The trend toward greater freedom of expression appears irreversible.

Newspapers have been closed, reporters and editors jailed — even killed, like Wu Xianghu, a newspaper editor who died last week after being beaten by the police, who reportedly were incensed by an article he published on abuses of power in their ranks. Still, the trend has not been reversed.

Editors, like Li Datong of a recently closed Beijing newspaper supplement, Bing Dian, officially owned by the Communist Party Youth League, have begun to use the courts to challenge government efforts to silence them. But many frustrated reporters have simply moved to blogs, which give them an outlet to write about what they are not permitted to in their day jobs.

“Symbolically, the government may have scored a victory with Google, but Web users are becoming a lot more savvy and sophisticated, and the censors’ life is not getting easier,” said Xiao Qiang, leader of the Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. “The flow of information is getting steadily freer, in fact. If I was in the State Councils information office, I certainly wouldn’t think we had any reason to celebrate.”

In light of this trend, isn’t it time the CCP end its antiquated and failed policy of persecuting and imprisoning cyberdissidents and muckraking reporters? Isn’t it like trying to stop the Yangtze River with a bucket?

My questions are, of course, rhetorical, as we all know they aren’t going to stop the repression anytime soon. Eventually, however, the Party has to face the fact that its critics are here to stay and cannot all be silenced. Eventually. For now, expect more arrests and never-ending crackdowns on self-expression.