When the human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng escaped extra-legal house arrest and beatings and found his way to the U.S. Embassy last month, he became an instant hero on the Chinese Internet.
How had he escaped? How could a single blind man tear such a hole in the government's pervasive blanket of weiwen, or stability maintenance? Many called it a "miracle"; stories of "China's blind spiderman" went viral. Eventually someone who had helped Chen tweeted an account. Chen had done merely this: "In 19 hours climbed eight walls, jumped a dozen or so irrigation ridges, fell down a few hundred times, injured a foot, and finally crossed a stream that got him out of the village."
The Internet is the first medium in the history of Communist rule in China that the government has not been able to fully control. The authorities hire hundreds of thousands of police and spend billions of yuan annually monitoring the Web and blocking unwanted messages. Yet for hundreds of millions of Chinese, the Internet continues to grow as a source of uncensored news and platform for popular expression. Regarding Chen, Internet opinion has been overwhelmingly positive.