I’m not quite over jet lag yet, so I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to post this. Here are the stories I didn’t get to post in China:

My first experience with censorship in China started before I even got there.

In June, I stopped by Half-Price Books to find something to entertain me on the plane. I landed on The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian, written in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, mostly because it was cheap.

The day before I boarded my flight to Beijing, I read a book review in the New Yorker about a controversial Chinese author whose works were banned in China. The author’s name looked familiar, so I took out my copy of the Noodle Maker. It was the same author, Ma Jian. I flipped to the first page, where printed in tiny, italicized letters was a warning that this book was banned in Mainland China.

I was shocked. What did China think I was going to do with this book any way? Start a revolution? I just wanted something to read!

What could I do? I left the book in my Chicago hotel room and caught the shuttle for the airport.

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I was in China for two full months. As I blogged in July, I never felt any pressure to censor or revise my articles to please Chinese authorities. I just steered clear of the 3 T’s — Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan — and figured I was fine. Meanwhile, the press working in China strained against the force of government censorship.

Then, everything flipped. August came, and Beijing became Olympic Beijing. The world started watching, and press freedoms grew abundantly, and mine began shrinking.

Just before the Olympics started, the faculty from the University of Missouri called a meeting for our interns. We walked across campus to the meeting hall and watched as our faculty checked and double-checked that no one was listening outside the door or windows. Then, they started to explain the rules.

There is no freedom of the press here, they started. We wish we’d had this conversation in Missouri, where we could have talked openly, but for now, just remember where you are.

They asked us to listen carefully as they read out loud: Chinese residents are now allowed to complain against the government as long as they do so privately. Anti-government statements in public or on the Internet will not be tolerated.

Then they looked at us, hard, trying to communicate without actually speaking anything that could be overheard.

Remember where you are, they told us. There are microphones in every taxi and cameras on every corner. Internet activity is monitored. There are people watching and listening, and they could be listening to you. You are in China.

And whatever you do, they told us, don’t blog this while you’re here!
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Here’s what we found out in hushed whispers after the meeting.

Apparently, one student had already been deported/sent home/asked to leave after writing scathing complaints against China and the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games. Journalists in Hong Kong found her and other student bloggers’ comments and were threatening to publish them throughout Mainland China.

That’s when we realized the true nature of Chinese censorship. Authorities use censorship and security as a means of managing their own image in the eyes of the rest of the world. Their greatest fear seems to be that one individual will say something to shatters that image, and so all communication is monitored. This didn’t affect me directly in July, when the world only cast the occasional glance to China. But once Olympic season started, the message was clear.

Write one thing that disproved the image China was promoting, and suffer the consequences.
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Security at the Olympics was a joke.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, nothing bad happened. There was no violence or terrorism. Media reports from all sides said the security at the Beijing Olympics was the best and least-intrusive they’d ever seen.

But here’s the truth. Security was run by unpaid, 20-something economics majors. If you talked like you knew what you were doing, you could get in anywhere, anytime without the correct (or even any) accreditation.

I met people who got on to the Olympic Green without a ticket or a staff pass. I watched as my peers snuck in to the Main Press Center and other venues.

Even I snuck in to the Water Cube one night. Remember that video? Ya, I definitely not allowed to be in there, let alone in a back room where the wall was exposed.

In my opinion, the fact that no terrorist incident happened on Beijing’s Olympic Green had more to say about China’s enemies then about China.
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Remember all those news stories about how China was teaching it’s taxi drivers English in preparation for the Games?

Total bunk. If they learned it, they promptly forgot it. The taxi drivers didn’t know a lick of English.

And honestly, that was fine. We had maps and Chinese names of all the places we wanted to go. We knew the Chinese words for “keep going,” “left,” and “right.” The language barrier was tough, but not impossible.

The real problem was that the taxi drivers had NO idea where they were going.
Why did China think it was a good idea to teach the taxi drivers how to speak English and not how to get to the Olympic Venues? Tell a taxi driver to go to the Birds Nest in Chinese, and they would just stare at you blankly and shake their head. We even had taxi drivers refuse to take us, mubling to themselves in Mandarin and shaking their hand at us.

It was almost enough to make me brave Chinese traffic on a bicycle. Almost.