While today's Chinese government is just as censorious and authoritarian as its predecessors, some of today's Chinese media figures aren't rolling over and playing dead.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

A media clampdown - the latest of many over the years - has seen a string of journalists disciplined, dismissed or even jailed for violating official guidelines.

Some of the campaign's targets, however, are refusing to be silenced.

And they have found plenty of supporters - some in unlikely quarters - willing to speak up on their behalf.

"There is now an unstoppable wave of demands for more freedom of expression and resistance to the old propaganda policies," said Jiao Guobiao, who was forced to resign his post as a journalism professor last year after accusing the government of handling the press in a manner worthy of Nazi Germany.

The row over the extent of people's right to know has shown that the Communist Party's authority is ebbing away, he said.

But without censorship, the Party could not maintain its rule for a day, he said.

The article talks about the recent Bing Dian (Freezing Point) case, which I've previously posted on. However, while journalists stand up on their hind legs every once in a while, the opposition to censorship is coming from other parts of Chinese society:

"It is not good for the Communist Party to keep to its old ways", said Jiang He, who runs a hi-tech company in the western city of Chongqing.

China's rapid economic growth is proving a strong force for change, he said, pointing out that the media was already far more open in many ways than in the past.

"It's such an information age. There's no way anyone can block everything," he said.

China's 11,000 newspapers and periodicals and more than 600 radio and TV stations are more intent these days on satisfying the demands of the market than the state censor, who no longer pays their bills.

"People are not interested in reading politically-correct communiqués in their newspapers," according to John Kennedy, a Canadian journalism graduate based in the southern province of Guangdong.

"The media have seized upon pushing harder and digging deeper, writing about corruption and Communist Party scandals as ways to sell more papers," he said.