a friend read this and said "It's well-written, albeit sad/pessimistic article, but it can mostly be summed up by one of the author's sentences: "Many of my local friends abhor the system as much as I do, but they have no choice. I do. I am lucky.""

I read about Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangchen and Liu Xiaobo on Weibo, the closely monitored Chinese equivalent of Twitter and Facebook, where a post only has to be up for a few minutes to go viral. My wife had never heard of them until she started using the site. The censors will never completely master it. (The day my wife began reading Weibo was also the day she told me she had overcome her concerns about leaving China for the UK.) There are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of mainland Chinese who “follow” such people too, and there must be countless more like them in person, trying in their small way to make China a better place. One day they will prevail. That’ll be a good time to become Chinese. It might even be possible.

I'd like to believe that the seeds of change have already been planted.