China has spent a great deal of time being portrayed as an oppressive force when it comes to information traveling into and out of the country. Talk of Internet censorship began to grab some steam in 2007, and the Communist Party hasn’t escaped that label since. Yet it’s critical for outside observers to take a few steps back from the day-to-day news cycle in order to get a more comprehensive view of where it’s been and where it may go in the months and years ahead. Here we give you one such timeline.

If we’ve managed to miss any items from recent past, share your picks in the comments!

Size Matters

As we can all now appreciate, portions of China’s populace have familiarized themselves with the Internet to varying degrees over the last several years. Still, there is a real big limit to their digital freedoms. It’s called the Great Firewall.

So it’s important to understand where the government wants to carry the country to recognize that opening is happening and will continue to happen in the years ahead. It’s important to recognize the financial highlights made in the press over past few years for what they are. Seven-, eight-, and nine-figure funding deals, along with talk of IPOs, has been consistent. This year’s news of gaming venture 9you is just one example. I gather from these events that commerce has become the dominant religion of the red jungle. Which means great things for the country as a whole.

Harsh Treatment

Of course, the road for people in China fortunate enough to experience the Web has been a rough one. Not too long ago it was a weekly practice for bloggers beyond the country’s borders to make note of banned websites and censorship and, in some cases, arrests.

Remember when Yahoo and Microsoft spoke openly of their compliance with the Chinese government’s pursuit of censorship?

Yahoo’s CEO was later forced to endure congressional questioning in the US as a result of its release of user information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of Shi Tao, a journalist in the country.

Suffice it to say that Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google eventually came to learn that such behavior wouldn’t be accepted by American regulators as “the way things must go in the world of international business,” and agreed last month to guidelines for managing ventures in places suspect of human rights abuses.

Amplified Concerns

Forward to 2008, when we’ve seen many multinational corporations endure conflicts with China’s network of regulators. At the start of the year, Google saw YouTube blocked for hosting material having to do with protests in Tibet. CNN was later blocked for toeing a “China-no-good” line (our phrasing, not CNN’s) leading up to the Olympics.

As noise on the matter increased, Western press outfits en masse began to question the Chinese government on the topic of Web access during the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Weeks of lingering coverage poured fourth in the springtime and early- to mid-summer.

The Olympic Games Begin to Turn the Tide

But while it made news prior to the games’ commencement, once things really began and progressed through 3 weeks of athletic records broken and, followed by a closing ceremony as spectacular as the one which started the whole thing, few news outlets based outside the Chinese mainland managed to revisit the subject of access. Or if they did, it was not to dwell on the present and the immediate past, but to hypothesize on what China would become in subsequent seasons. The pomp certainly won out over the circumstance in the Chinese capital.

That meant good news for China. Great news, in fact. The entire spectacle was a resounding success. Commentators started to believe that changes for the better would be made as a result of the games. But it was not the only advantage gained by the nation, and more specifically, the people.

The Crisis in Sichuan Province

Before the games had begun, there was the crisis inflicted by the earthquake in Sichuan Province, which wrought massive amounts of damage to infrastructure and claimed tens of thousands of lives, many of them young of age.

The sheer enormity of the event drove the Chinese government to allow for conversation about crisis to flow largely without limits on the Web. That went as much for emergency response as conversation on the how and why for the damage dealt. Local officials were blamed severely for aiding in the propagation of poor construction practices.

Thus, the question for the Chinese people and the world beyond to then consider became one of the possibility of permanent openness. Given the fact that rebuilding will take a great deal of time to fully accomplish, one can hope there is some enduring benefit to be had from the disaster, however unfortunate it was to so many citizens.

Big Change Comes Slowly

Let’s stress China’s desire to adjust at its own pace. Since things quieted down from a height of intense awareness of limits in the middle of the year, other negatives have come to the fore, not including the matter of tainted baby food. Recent reports of hacks performed via China on the White House network, for instance, while not unprecedented, have raised numerous red flags in Washington as well as the cyber division of the US Air Force Space Command (formerly known as AFCYBER), among other departments

Yes, China’s movements in the tech space are rough, sporadic, and in many ways slow-going. But there’s reason to establish an optimistic view of the future. That’s because the way the ruling party has conducted itself as of late has become very, very market oriented. It may be a heavily controlled market, but growth behooves the controller to loosen its grip to allow for continued expansion.

International commerce is what has led China to grow by enormous bounds for the last several seasons, and it is what makes Chinese society and the government’s interaction with the rest of the world considerably more transparent and open to exploration by outsiders. That goes as much for news as entertainment, too. Just look at MySpace and Facebook’s recent dealings with the Chinese market and the competition they’ve encountered there in sites like Xiaonei, Xiaoyou.

Realistically speaking, China won’t emulate the West anytime soon. It may never go so far, in fact. But it will come considerably closer to a progressive cohesiveness as we travel into the next decade. There’s simply too much money on the table not to make that effort.

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/bkindler

; China BackPacker

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Yahoo China Launches a MySpace CloneIn China, MySpace and MSN Make Unlikely FriendsiPhone Coming to China Mobile?MySpace China Creating an Instant Messenger ServiceMySpace China Next Week - How Much Censorship?Yahoo Goes to China; Takes 10 Percent Stake in Alibaba.comMySpace.cn is Live