I am convinced that many bans are not to encourage a "harmonius society" but to give Chinese internet companies an advantage in the marketplace- Youkou and Ren Ren would be examples. Read also the furore about Google in China.

Good point and it fits well with an article on the BBC (available 95% of the time in China) today regarding the lack of success that Chinese brands are having abroad. I was particularly interested to learn that Lenovo is a Chinese company. I genuinely did not know that and the brand name doesn't suggest a link to the motherland. I guess that this was a deliberate ploy by the organization to not be associated with the reputation that the term made in China carries with it. It certainly explains why the Chinese feel the need to protect their domestic market.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17998321

I'd agree that generally it's easy to get hold of any information or news that you want particularly with a VPN and while the Chinese government does occasionally make it awkard to access things there is always the flipside that there are very little in the way of copyright and intellectual property laws here which makes accessing certain media (particularly if you're familiar with the Chinese language sites) very easy indeed.