A few weeks ago, there was a lot of noise on China-related English language blogs about Microsoft censoring the words for "democracy" and "freedom" from its Chinese blogging platform. This led to discussion about the ways in which American corporations are aiding the Chinese government to control the flow of information over the Internet. Much of this discussion was widely reported in the Western media, but probably unnoticed by the average Joe in Paris and New York, and most certainly unnoticed by the average Zhou in Chengdu and Beijing.

Your humble correspondent was very cynical about the whole affair and especially the Western reaction to it, mainly because I did not see any Chinese people getting really upset about it.

I am South African. I come from a country where there has only been real freedom of expression and publication for a decade, which makes me especially value those freedoms. But I am also aware that as in China, South Africa's worst human rights problems are connected with the rights to land ownership, not the right to free speech.

This is because in South Africa, as in China, the inequities of the last 200 years have resulted in many murky and intractable land disputes. And when people do not know what property rights they have — and this refers to highly tangible property like land and cars and chunks of gold — society has a tough time organizing itself in a fair way. Land rights problems cannot be solved with easy solutions devised in Washington or Oslo, and they are at the heart of some of the world's worst conflicts.

So while I have nothing but respect for the free expression idealism of the American bloggers linked below, I am more interested in how China and Africa can solve unglamorous land disputes than whether or not Chinese bloggers can write the words 'fuck' and 'democracy' on some Johnny-come-lately Microsoft blogging platform.