But Chinese netizens are fighting back. A vast number of volunteers are engaging in highly popular translation projects, disseminating American and British magazines, TV shows and university courses to huge numbers of followers. You can even download the Chinese version of the Economist directly on to your smartphone. 

These translation collectives, who make no profit for themselves, are motivated by a desire to embrace Western culture and to access non-censored news items. This practice is not illegal — yet. But if China legislates against these volunteers — and as Amnesty International notes, it "has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world", this is likely soon — these cyber pirates have ways of circumventing the Great Firewall, which they pejoratively term the "Red Crab".

The internet has created an insatiable appetite for young Chinese to learn about the West. But it has also provided a window into that world, one which the Chinese government will struggle to shut. As the Chinese artist and dissident Ai WeiWei put it, "They are going to want to know who Liu Xiaobo is and why he won this prize. They are going to learn who he is and this way they are going to learn more about freedom, democracy, justice and about the Tiananmen generation."