If you say the word ‘protest’ too frequently in a cell-phone conversation in Beijing, your call gets cut off. No spice. We have pretty strict phone etiquette policies here at 2ov, granted, but generally we allow calls, once placed, to proceed without Big Brother intervention.

Over at NYT, there’s some discussion being raised over a Beijing entrepreneur who got cut off mid-conversation with his wife for quoting that ‘the lady doth protest too much’ bit from Shakespeare; the word protest, here, rather than wanky quotation is what earned the governmental smack-down. Similar anecdotal accounts are popping up elsewhere.

This isn’t just a matter of seeing what information gets passed around – which is problematic enough; we’re seeing more and more restrictions on the information available in China via search engines. For about six months the word ‘freedom’ returned no Google results, which sounds like an unsubtle film sequence but hey.

Say the folk at NYT:

A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the cat is getting bigger, especially since revolts began to ricochet through the Middle East and North Africa, and homegrown efforts to organize protests in China began to circulate on the Internet about a month ago.

I’d take the ‘host of evidence’ with a pinch of salt, mind, but stuff does seem to be getting a little real over there.

[Source: NYT]