Orville Schell, a veteran China observer based at the Asia Society in New York, distinguished between the Chinese government’s ability to control communication inside the country and outside it.
“They won’t be effective in controlling much of what’s going out of Hong Kong to the world, but they do a very good job of controlling what comes into China out of Hong Kong,” he said. Various government techniques to censor the Internet in China proper, he said, are probably 95% effective: “You have to really want to get the information to do what it takes to vault the (government cyber) wall, and most people don’t.”
via Hong Kong vs. Tiananmen: Social media fuel ‘umbrella revolution’.