Waiting for the knock on his door...

In a country where internet giant google fears to rock the boat, and where Yahoo even purportedly aids and abets "big brother", there are yet those brave souls who choose to thumb their nose at the face of tyranny. Read on...

From Reuters:

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese Communist Party elders and U.S. lawmakers fired shots at China's powerful censors this week, but Li Xinde says muck-raking campaigners like himself are undermining the country's barriers to free speech every day.

Li is one of just a handful of Internet investigative reporters, exposing corrupt officials and injustice on his China Public Opinion Surveillance Net (www.yuluncn.com).

Then he spreads his often outrageous, sometimes gruesome stories on some of the 49 blogs he uses to slip past censors.

"They shut down one, so I move to another," he told Reuters.

"It's what Chairman Mao called sparrow tactics. You stay small and independent, you move around a lot, and you choose when to strike and when to run."

Li, 46, lives in Fuyang, a city of 360,000 in the rural eastern province of Anhui, and he is far from a household name among Chinese readers, even Internet enthusiasts.

But some of the cases he first reported became notorious after other reporters, even state-run television, took them up. Li's Web site has become a magnet for discontented rural citizens hoping to turn his spotlight on their complaints.

You can find one of Li's sites here (You can translate it here--if you can make sense out of the syntax).

China is a nation of great spirit, that has too long been overrun by the iron fist of tyranny. Of the over 1.3 billion of its inhabitants, there exists a "critical mass" of fearless patriots who not only question its authoritarian regime, but in the spirit of the brave souls who were ultimately slaughtered in Tianamen Square in 1989, they continue the fight for freedom.

Gives one hope, not only for the future of China, but for the world as well.

(Filed under Heroes, world affairs)