The Christian Science Monitor argues that the PRC’s attempt to resist or redirect global information flows is bound to fail:

Beijing leaders are looking more like King Canute,
the English monarch who ordered the tide to retreat. Their attempts to
ban certain types of news seem downright silly to those Chinese who now
thrive on global flows of information in a buzzing economy.

    They script a "news is water" metaphor – "tide of history," "inexorable flow of news" – to press their point home:

Each new media control is a futile, rearguard reaction
by the party to the threat of globalization and the creative inroads of
new information technologies. Last year, for instance, the China Youth
Daily had to quickly withdraw a reward program for reporters who
praised government officials after reports of the bonuses spread on the
Internet.

Not only has a rapidly growing market economy created
more disgruntled groups, it’s created the means for them to organize
and express their grievances, either to journalists or through open
protest. The Leninists in the party must still believe that century-old
tactics of suppression can be beefed up to curb these modern threats to
their top-down rule and information monopoly. Perhaps they can for a
while, but the tide of history and the inexorable flow of news is
against them. Unpleasant facts about official abuse or man-made
environmental disasters cannot be hidden for long these days.

As China further opens itself to the world, such as
hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics, the party will find it can’t turn
back the tide of history that will lead to more freedom of information,
not less.

 I picked up on the Taoist connotations.  Let’s develop them a bit.

    Here an excerpt from the Tao Te Ching, passage 8:

Lofty nobility is like water.
Water’s nobility is to enrich the ten thousand things and yet never strive:
It just settles through places people everywhere loathe.
Therefore, it’s nearly Way.

    Water runs down hill; it seeks out the lowest points.  Although "people everywhere" might despise swamps and marshes, these places "enrich the ten thousand things."  Thus, they are places of "lofty nobility," not the ersatz nobility of power-holders and status seekers.  The TTC is, in this passage, challenging our sense of what is valuable and important.  It is telling us that real significance is to be found not at the heights of political power, but in the depths of social weakness.

     Applying the "information is water" metaphor here, we can see that news, made more abundant and free-flowing by globalized information technology, is now running downhill toward the socially weak and repressed: it enriches the "ten thousand things."  Although "people everywhere" – which we might take here as those who benefit from current power structures – may not like the empowering effects of news on the poor and dispossessed and politically outcast, the overall result is the nurturing of "lofty nobility." 

     There is a certain optimism here – in both the CSM editorial and the TTC outlook – about the prospects for justice and equality, as suggested in this excerpt from TTC, passage 78:

Nothing in all beneath heaven is so soft and weak as water.
And yet, for conquering the hard and the strong,
nothing succeeds like water.

And nothing can change it:
weak overcoming strong,
soft overcoming hard.
Everything throughout all beneath heaven knows this,
and yet nothing puts it into practice.

    It seems inevitable that weak will overcome strong, that the flow of globalized news will empower the poor and repressed.  But notice that last line: "yet nothing puts it into practice."  Obviously, "hard" Leninist rulers will push against the transforming power of the weak.  And, perhaps, it may be difficult for the weak to harness and direct the liberating force of information.  But this is the ultimate optimism of Taoism: even without the conscious efforts of human beings, the weak will overcome the strong, the soft will envelop the hard.

    The truth will out.