The loosening of restrictions, however limited, came after senior International Olympic Committee officials on Thursday spoke with Olympic organizers and urged them to reconsider their decision to maintain a ban on politically sensitive sites, which critics said violated previous pledges China had made to provide uncensored Internet access to reporters.

We now know that when China’s top-level delegation bid for Beijing to host the 2008 Games seven years ago, promising a new China, they lied. As I write this, more than 150 websites are being blocked - including BBC China and German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle - journalists are being harassed, and areas such as Tiananmen Square are being tightly restricted.

The current fad for push-ups in China is just one example of the extraordinary lengths to which Chinese internet users - netizens, as they are called - have to go to skirt the country’s noose of censorship. Pitted against these efforts is the Great Firewall of China - or the Golden Shield Project, to give it its official name - which is intended to prevent, deter and detect anyone who reads, downloads or publishing reports deemed to challenge the government’s hold on power.

The Chinese Government, which sponsors virtually every ugly regime in the world from Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir’s Sudan, to Kim Jong-il’s PDRK, has discovered that conning a bunch of bloated jet-setters with swollen senses of self-entitlement is a walk in the park.

The double whammy of increased internet censorship coupled with the news that the Public Security Bureau had installed spying software in international hotels flies in the face of promises for complete media freedom made by the Chinese authorities when they won the right to host the Olympic Games in 2001.

A spokesman for the Beijing organising committee announced earlier that journalists would not be able to access information or websites connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned in China, as well as other, as yet unspecified sites.

The number of Internet users jumped more than 50 percent during the last year to a total of 253 million. The new estimate, reported by the government-affiliated China Internet Network Information Center, represents only about 19 percent of the country’s population, underscoring the potential for growth. By contrast, about 220 million Americans are online, totalling 70 percent of the population.