Appreciate the feedback. I've had a different experience though, are you speaking English or Chinese to them? My Chinese friends don't speak great English, and while they would like nothing more to visit or study there, they feel the future belongs to Asia and China.

I completely agree with your sentiment: lack of free speech and govt interference makes me nuts. I have had the luck of spending (aggregate) about half my time this year there and have to use the internet constantly. Indeed the internet there has to be the most annoying thing to man. . .but (and this is not exactly a good thing) most of my Chinese friends are dumbfounded when I tell them the internet is not supposed to have zillions of pages that come up empty, or be randomly really slow, or have gmail crash all the time, or not be able to access BBC, or not be able to get to Wikipedia, that just kills me. What's even worse is you really don't notice though if you're surfing in Chinese, the sensors are a lot better and smoother (again, not a good thing but they're less obvious). And if you've ever had the (dis)pleasure of watching CCTV world news in Chinese and knowing what they're saying, news coverage makes you (as presumably someone who can read a variety of news sources that aren't state-owned) want to tear your hair out not because of what they say in Chinese (usually always factually true), but because of what they don't say (usually something important). It's like only have Fox News or Al Frankin's radio show but not both. Painful. . .but it also has really created a bit of a patriotic culture in the last few years that has been gaining steam. Am I a fan of that? Definitely not. But alas, I just have to shake my head and trudge through getting kicked out of VPN like twice an hour. Ahh, I can't wait for Beijing next week.