internet - Censorship: a mountain or a molehill?

Rebecca MacKinnon summerizes extensively her contribution to a panel together with media mogul Hung Huang, where they debated the way China deals with the internet, purification, as it is called in China. In that context, Rebecca takes the US-view on things, while Hung Huang takes the - admittedly elitist - Chinese view. In Rebecca's translation Hung takes a hit at her:

But idealistic foreigners never understand China as well as the foreigners who have selfish motives. And most of the people who have been journalists in China, especially for major media organizations, are all idealists. This leads to a bias in the foreign media towards China, and Rebecca is no exception. I am always loathe to talk about issues related to "internet purification" [a Chinese euphemism for censorship]. If this policy is necessary, one shouldn't use such silly terms to implement it. One reason is that the foreign media misunderstands and they are given an excuse to make a mountain out of a molehill, which is really too bad. Second is that this kind of broad, theoretical, and impressionistic thing [policy] is very hard to implement. It would be good if there were an open, legally-grounded approach, then everybody would be clear about what's going on and what's against the law, and that's that, and then it wont be so exasperating. Rebecca spoke for a long time, and I think she spoke almost entirely about "purification", but because I am timid, and I treasure my blog, I won't repeat it. But I still want to bring up this "purification" and this way I don't need to cover it up. Just writing this paragraph of darn words has taken me two hours to write - just this paragraph!