I don't agree with what China is doing, but I still think there are understandable reasons for it. For one, if China let the internet be completely open, much of the young population could potentially flock to already mature websites and China wouldn't have much of a chance to develop their own web ecosystem before loosing the market to the west. They seem to be controlling for the fact that the US got massive a head start by isolating their web and forcing domestic innovation.<p>As for police in web companies, this is terrible from a western point of view, but there are a lot of things western people don't understand about Chinese society: China has a very large population of people without formal education. During the cultural revolution there were only around 47,000 people in college. Combine that with a cultural tendency of Chinese people to organize in large groups and you have a massive populace vulnerable to influence from cults, pyramid schemes, fraud, and dangerous mobs. I saw a lot of this when I lived there, my wife's cousin even lost his mind after being brainwashed by a weird fraud/pyramid scheme group. Also when there is a mob in China it's sometimes so big that nothing short of the military can stop it, so naturally the govt. would want be proactive about preventing these things. So we have free speech in the US but we also have to deal with anti-vaccers, can you imagine if an anti-vaccine group took hold in a place as populated as China? Again, I don't like what China is doing, and perhaps I'm being too optimistic about their intentions, but after studying China for about a decade I can kind of see where they are coming from with this kind of thing.