The Net Nannies – as Westerners who live in China and who frequent the Internet call Chinese government censors equipped with their website-snuffling software kits – are nothing if not adaptable. They are also quick studies. From the time of the uprising in Tibet last year and last month’s protests in Iran, the Net Nannies have proven they have been studious .

Actually, according to a well-written and concise guide to internet censorship in China on the blog Chinayouren, the authorities essentially use three methods to expunge unwanted information and perspective from domestic internet pages: The Great Firewall, Search Engine Manipulation and the Net Nanny. Add to that Disruption of Service attacks, and a government has a crude but effective arsenal with which to warp any reality.

The powers that be hit the panic button this past Sunday with an all-out Disruption of Service onslaught that brought down the websites of the Urumqi city and Xinjiang regional governments, according to Reuters. The Chinese government quickly moved to end service to all mobile phones in Urumqi, to keep portable cameras and video recorders from beaming out to the world images of the protests and the government’s dramatic response.

The Great Firewall of China (GFW) blocked the Twitter service, so observers and participants in what had quickly become a battle zone between Uighur citizens and Han migrants from being commented about in the public domain. National level censors also blocked the popular social networking site Facebook, which supports its own email service as well as posts on “walls” for invitees to read and to comment on. (Didn’t need the New York Times to tell us that here in China, but here is the reference anyway).

The popular YouTube service continued to be blocked during the urumqi uprising, initially shut down during the Tibetan riots of the year before. During the riots Tibetan protesters were taking advantage of the spotlight the coming Beijing Olympics had brought to China to air the same issues their Muslim neighbors to the north – the Uighurs – would take to the streets in protest. The Tibetans were able to transmit images outside their borders the violence of the crackdown against the protests by taking digital photos and film of the police action and posting the drama on Youtube, virtually as it was happening.

The GFW also blocked the Chinese version of Youtube, Fanfou, just after the Urumqi Incident, presumably because users were able to post politically objectionable videos about the uprising on its video display service. The Great Firewall is what (mostly) Westerners call the software that seeks out and blocks websites that promote material the Communist Party finds objectionable: websites by or about the Falun Gong – the spiritual group -ejected from China in 1999; websites or web pages dedicated to the remembrance of Tiananmen Square; pornography websites overtly labeled, sites admiring and promoting the Dalai Lama or Tibetan independence are especially targeted by the Great Firewall.

Interestingly, even during the explosive events in Urumqi, major newspapers with online articles about the protests and ensuing violence remained accessible in China. The New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist Magazine, and outlets like Reuters and the BBC remained open for viewing. Likely, they considered the absolute number of readers in China who could read and appreciate what English-language media outlets were writing too small to consider dangerous to the message the government wanted to spin. However, the Great Firewall did not release its blocks from long-time censored blogspot.com, nor from bloglines.com, a news and blog aggregator that likely provided a channel for anti-government blogs from outside China to make their way in to a readership inside China.

The government also deployed a second line of defense against disseminating information that ran counter to its policies about Xinjiang – or simply embarrassed government diktat – called Search Engine Manipulation (SEM). SEM involves the government filtering a list of search results based on the most probable key words techno-chiks (that is, technology-inclined apparatchiks) believe interested readers are most likely to query. Popular Chinese sites like Baidu, Sina.com, Google.com and Google.cn had posted government-approved results-lists of the uprising in Urumqi, with a high density of articles from Xinhua and the People’s Daily, mouthpieces of the Chinese government. Few major international news outlets like Reuters, the BBC, the New York Times et al had results listed on the pages for searches such as “Urumqi” and “Urumqi protests.”

However, it’s the Net Nanny that is probably most effective at ensuring Chinese cybernauts cleave to the government’s point of view on this and other sensitive issues. The Net Nanny simply eliminates content it doesn’t like, wipes complete entries from servers. As Chinayouren cites in his blog entry, “China Internet Censorship Explained,” “The Nanny’s power comes from the menace of closing down a page, taking away the business license or directly imposing “stern punishment” on offenders.”

Hence, the internet in China hosts very little in the way of debate about the Urumqi issue. Mostly, surviving blog posts by Chinese nationals have nicely fallen in line with party policy. Reuters reported one hyper-politically correct blogger posted on Sina.com.cn, “Resolutely smash the splitist forces and terrorists!” Certainly got me to thinking deeply. The same Reuters article cited another thoughtful cybernut who wrote, “Destroy the conspiracy, strike hard against these saboteurs, and strike even more fiercely than before,” on sina.com.cn.

And then there’s one of my favorites, straight out of a 1950s Party film, “The blood debt will be repaid. Han compatriots unite and rise up,” found on www.baidu.com (Reuters).

The odd domestic voice does squeak through the bristles of the Net Nanny’s broom. For instance, Reuters cited one blog entry that said, “If your family members have no rights, no power, are discriminated against and made fun of, not only will your family collapse, you will already have sown the seeds of hatred.”

However, media observers have noted the Net Nanny has come down hard on some domestic web sites, simply expunging content. For instance, the bulletin board on the Shanghai site pchome.net had numerous comments about the unrest, but they all vanished a few hours later, replaced with the line: “This posting does not exist.”

Question Authority.