Throwing a bit dye into the geist, a group of programmers have developed a Firefox plugin that will route your websurfing through a Chinese server, thus allowing you to get sense of what sort of Internet the Chinese state security services have in mind for their citizens. [Link to the plugin project website]
The control that governments, and other interested parties, can exert over one’s websurfing can take a much more insidious form than simply block content. Through some form of packet injection, or server based cacheing, web pages can be changed en route to the web browser, thus allowing for the manipulation of the user’s trust and expectation.
For more information, The Atlantic published an interesting article during the 2008 Olympics about the limitations and scope of the system.