I think the government really regrets the Internet... Originally, they thought it would be like the newspaper or the television -- just another way to get their view out to the people. What they didn’t realize is that people can type and talk back. This is giving them a really big headache.

-- Chinese racecar driver, novelist, and all-around heartthrob Han Han who has been tweaking, with humor and sarcasm, what he sees as the failings in Chinese culture and government on his his widely-read blog, as quoted in a piece by the New York Times' Andrew Jacobs. "With more than 300 million hits to his blog," writes Jacobs, "[Han] may be the most popular living writer in the world."

Here's a fascinating little twist for those of us who have been tracking the Google vs. China conflict, but mostly focused on the conflict's (significant) public policy implications. What has mostly been talked about as a cybersecurity face-off is seeping into the more purely political realm -- in what might be reasonably seen as a precursor to the impact of Google's faceoff with China on domestic politics.

A PAC by the name of Patriot Majority has put out a two-minute web spot called "Hacked" that ties cybersecurity aggressions allegedly coming from China to a push, from the American left, to defend "American values, American workers, American businesses, and American jobs." Patriot Majority is affiliated with Democratic strategist and a former advisor to Governor Tim Vilsack by the name of Craig Varoga. NPR reports that amongst Patriot Majority's funders are labor groups.

Featured prominently in "Hacked" are clips from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's provocative January address at the Newseum on "Internet freedoms." That speech, while well covered, hasn't really been treated as all that politically-charged, which a close read of it suggests that it is. But back to this spot. News reports on the infiltration of Google's networks provide the intro. There's Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond arguing that an increase in Chinese censorship makes practicing business in the country untenable. Then we see shots of American innovators -- Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, George Washington Carver -- as a voiceover intones:

For more than two hundred years, America has grown strong and led the world because we are innovators and believe that freedom is the foundation of success. We will remain true to these traditions at home and across the globe, especially, as they are under attack.

In a bit of unfortunate editing, "under attack" is heard as a picture of Jonas Salk wielding a vaccination needle like a knife floats across the screen. But we're quickly kicked back to Clinton's speech. Her address focused on the Internet's global promise. But front and center here is her promise to defend America's cyber infrastructure:

States, terrorists, and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks.

Then comes the kicker. Talk China's alleged nefariousness are dropped in favor of a broad appeal to some traditional talking points on protecting jobs here at home:

Patriot Majority believes that it is our patriotic duty to pursue policies that strengthen our national security, boost the economy, create jobs, and improve the lives of all Americans and their families.

An ad that spins the Google and China conflict into a domestic referendum on political priorities is intriguing (at least to this observer). But that doesn't mean it has attracted much attention. It's only attracted 55 views on YouTube since its release last Wednesday.

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has just debuted a new online visa application form.

If all goes well, DS-160, as the embassy's new web application is called, will ease the process of getting a visa for the many students and other would-be visitors from China to the United States. And there are hopes that going digital will save some 3 million pieces of paper a year.

But yeah, we're mostly just posting this for the picture.

China's so-called netizens revolt when "Avatar" -- and its provocative storylines about industrial expansion -- gets bumped from movie screens in favor of a tepid government-backed biopic on Confucius. The amazing thing? In perhaps a sign of the changing relationship between the people and the state, writes the New York Times' Simon Elegant, it was the government that relented.

Whoa, some potentially very significant news coming out of Google-ville this morning. The California-based company is now saying that security threats and government-mandated censorship has them reconsidering whether they should even be doing business in China, an enormous market for the company that also happens to represent a considerable chunk of the user base of the Internet. Email accounts of human-rights activists in not only China, but in the U.S. and Europe as well, were being infiltrated, says Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond in a blog post on the Google Policy Blog.

Drummond stops short of saying it, but it's a quick leap from his comments and from the idea that the company is laying at least part of the blame for the security breaches squarely at the feet of the government in Beijing. These recent events have Drummond saying that Google will both (a) stop censoring search results on Google.cn immediately and (b) review the feasibility of our business operations in China. The Times UK is reporting that the decision was made by, more or less, three men in a room: CEO Eric Schmidt, and company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

It's the (a) part of that reaction that is particularly interesting, since it doesn't necessarily follow from the hacking attacks Drummond describes. Google's policy of working with the Chinese government to shape the Internet according to the Beijing's liking has always been discordant with it's "Don't Be Evil" mantra. But the company has, as we've noted recently, been more forceful in its rhetoric about being protectors of a free and open Internet, most recently with an openness manifesto of sorts posted on the company's policy blog. (The Times UK adds a business note: Google hasn't been particularly successful in China compared to the homegrown Baidu service, and a pullout would be a way to "save face.")

The Times UK also has a great tidbit that goes to show how technology impact today reaches the highest level of politics. Once those three guys in a room made a decision, they were sure to notify a fourth person: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Interesting little transparency-related detail from the New York Times editorial this weekend on what we're looking to see come out of Copenhagen.

The success of any binding international agreement on reducing carbon emissions hinges upon the willingness of major industrialized nations to abide by it. And the formula here is, as Ronald Reagan would say, "trust, but verify" -- with the emphasis on the verify part of the equation. In order for this to work, nations will probably have to be willing to open up access to high-quality government data on the carbon emissions being squirted into the atmosphere from within their borders. One sticky point heading into negotiation week in Copenhagen is that government transparency hasn't exactly been one of Beijing's strong suits. Perhaps Data.gov and the Obama Administration's recent pledge to open up the United States government gives American negotiators a little leverage as they call on China to open up. (Photo credit: Curt Carnemark/World Bank)

The Atlantic's Jim Fallows has been parsing Obama's recent Asia trip from every angle. Fallows has taken a pathologist's interest in understanding how American media coverage of the swing that painted it as a series of empty gestures so differed from perspectives in China. Take Obama's comments on the Great Firewall, that cobbled together system of Internet censorship that dictates the nature of a filtered, nationalistic Internet that all but the most determined Chinese experience. Obama's rebuke of China's online censorship may have seemed timid at the time, suggests Fallows. ("I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information...") But what more could an American president have said while in China, as a guest of the Chinese government? The American press, he suggests, totally missed that his comments -- and the fact that the question about the Great Firewall was raised at all -- was really fairly momentous. Fallows:

We All Know that the Shanghai town hall was an embarrassment, because the audience was packed with young Communist Party stalwarts who could be depended on to ask anodyne questions. ("What's the best step toward a Nobel Prize?" etc.) But remember the moment when Obama turned to Ambassador Jon Huntsman and said more or less, "Jon, did any questions come in via the internet?" I now have heard from enough different informed sources to be comfortable saying that the Chinese government did not know this was coming, and that the ensuing discussion about the Great Firewall was not at all according to their script. Jeremy Goldkorn adds a note about that question -- whose answer, as I mentioned earlier, has the potential to resonate within China. Goldkorn says:

"The Great FireWall question at the Shanghai town hall came directly from the blogger briefing arranged by the Embassy and consulates in Shanghai and Guangzhou. "I attended the briefing and live tweeted it. The bloggers included Anti and Bei Feng, two of the loudest voices calling for open media in China at the moment, but also Rao Jin from AntiCNN.com. The most common question, asked several times by different bloggers, was if Obama knew about the Great FireWall and if he would do something about it."

One added note, and one that might actually be important: you could make the argument that what Obama's new media team and White House have done with the Internet stateside was really what laid the groundwork for a provocative Great Firewall question during this China trip that came in "via the Internet," to borrow Amb. Hunstman's phrase. By holding domestic events like "Open for Questions" and other interactions with Obama where he was responsive to comments and questions that came in for him online, as well as blogger briefing calls like the one held by the White House last night after Obama's big Afghanistan speech, we've created an expectation that the American President engages with what's happening online, whether he's at home or abroad. That that's just how these things work these days. Internet-enabled townhalls are neat and nifty in the United States, sure. But they might in fact be game changing in settings, like China, where tradition and diplomatic protocol don't exactly invite an open exchange.

Yesterday, at a townhall meeting with Chinese students in Shaghai, President Obama had much praise for the Internet and its role in democracy, politics and society. Unfortunately, he prefaced his remarks with this statement:

"Let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people -- they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone."

The Washington Post's Keith B. Richburg has a great look at tech-empowered political and social resistance in China, where taking an online stand against the authorities can earn you much more than an unkind word from powers that be. A powerful culture of civic watchdoggery seems to be developing, despite the considerable risks:

Last June in Hubei province, an online campaign by netizens, as they a re popularly called here, helped free a 22-year-old waitress arrested for killing a local official in what appeared to be a clear case of self-defense. In Nanjing, a top official was expelled from the Communist Party and jailed after angry netizens posted photos online of him smoking expensive cigarettes, sporting a pricey watch and driving a Cadillac.

Across the country, online petition drives and surveys have prompted police to reopen closed cases, authorities to cancel unpopular development projects and the party's national leadership to fire corrupt local officials.

In the view of academic experts, lawyers, bloggers and others here, the Internet is introducing a new measure of public accountability and civic action into China's closed and opaque political system. "This is the era of disguised accountability," said Hu Xingdou, a sociology professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

"That means holding government officials accountable by relying on the Internet rather than on traditional means like elections and the checks by the Congress."

Moving stuff.

Global Voices' new Threatened Voices directory lists 34 Chinese bloggers who have been arrested or otherwise threatend by the authorities -- including Dr. Gao Yaojie, an 82 year-old gynecologist and AIDS activist.

YouTube's new decision to make usage metrics publicly available give us a whole new trove of information to mine about how various political actors and messages are doing. This information--who’s watching your videos, geographic distribution, traffic flows and total views, ratings by users--has always been available to video publishers through YouTube's Insight tool. Now, if publishers choose to make that info public, we can see it too. Some examples of what you can find out: President Obama's special video message to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday, which has more than 600K views, was "most popular" in Iran: