internet - Negotiating in China: how to get unblocked

Sorry for slacking here a bit: sometimes I really have to do other things so I can make a living. You cannot live by a blog alone - not yet.
The story of the blocking of Wikipedia and the unblocking of Google's Blogger.com is triggering off quite some interesting conversations. Danwei pointed at this site, explaining that you can go to your ISP and complain. Wikipedians told me earlier that they had gone to their Beijing ISP, filled in a form and were unblocked.

Apparently, the ISPs cannot reveal the reasons for a website being blocked because such decisions are usually taken by Public Security organizations and the ISPs do not usually know the reason themselves, but they can nonetheless pass on applications for a site to be unblocked.

That might be a good reason to explain in a more general way how you negotiate in China. First a warning: this is not for fainthearted people who believe that the Chinese government is a coherent, evil entity with as main target to curtail free speech on the internet. You are warned. Even more: I will praise Microsoft. Guess I have lost now most of my readers.
The Chinese government is heavily divided on how to deal with the internet. State-owned companies and business-oriented ministries see the internet as a way to bring prosperity to China - and of course themselves, that might even been more important.
But they have to deal with the more conservative security forces who want to maintain law and order. Anything that is going on concerning the internet has to deal with this - often rather murky - playfield which has a great number of parties and interests.
So, when you want to get unblocked, you have to negotiate and often use more liberal minded government departments to convince the conservative forces they should end a block, a closure, or whatever might be at stake.
In that negotiation process, the asking parties have to show goodwill. Microsoft did that very well, when it got a lot of negative publicity for censoring its China-service. Their superblogger Scobleizer unwittingly contributed a lot to the negotiation position of Microsoft. All that negative publicity, press releases by human rights organizations and whatever is part of it, is an essential ritual in those negotiations, helps to show a company is doing its best.
Microsoft played that game (perhaps without know it herself) perfect. Google now also seems to know how to play their cards. For the users it mean marginal limitation that are often easy to circumvent.
So, human rights organizations (who really should not read this entry) have an important role to play, although it might be a different one they think they are doing.

Update: Blogger Leo Lee tries to broker another deal between Google and Wikipedia.