Maybe the Chinese government gets a bad rap on the issue of censorship. Not that they aren’t censors. This Washington Post article shows how the government bars its people from accessing the Wikipedia page on China, which deals in such verboten subjects as Tiananmen Square.

The article (part of a three-part series that began yesterday) is topical because of the free speech issues surrounding the Muhammed cartoons; but China’s attitudes and those of Islamic fundamentalists don’t really compare. The Chinese government is telling its own people what they can read and write; whereas Islamic fundamentalists would tell people in other nations what to read and write. If anything, the comparison makes the Chinese government — for all its historical persecution of free speech — look positively tolerant. And that’s a scary thought.