If you don’t want the bundled mio TV or StarHub cable when you sign up for fibre broadband in Singapore, there’s a new online TV offering from upstart challenger Viewqwest this week – the popular PPTV online TV service from China.

Folks who sign up for Viewqwest’s Freedom VPN plan will get “VIP access” to the PPTV service, which streams thousands of popular Asian drama serials and some Hollywood movies. …

When Internet giant Google threatened to pull out of China in 2010, few were aware of the paradox that the Internet brings to China’s leaders beyond the political fodder.

In How China’s Leaders Think, Robert Kuhn, an international investment banker who has advised the Chinese government for over two decades, notes that Chinese leaders recognise that free access to information is critical for technological advancement and competitive success in world markets.

“On the other hand, they worry about potentially disruptive consequences of such free access which can deliver malicious, salacious and seditious information,” Kuhn says. …

Scenic sightseeing tours – not tanks making minced meat out of hapless civilians – are the results you will find if you do an online search for “Tiananmen Square” or “Tibet” while in China.

Propaganda, not reality, is what you get when looking for information behind the Great Firewall of China, so goes the Western view of China’s Internet censorship regime.

Thus, Google’s threat today to pull out of China altogether and to provide a search that is unfettered by the communist government’s censorship regime, has been greeted by some Western commentators as a good thing for freedom of speech in the awakening giant.

Question is: are things that simple? Dig deeper and you will find that this story of Google versus China has a lot more questions than answers. …