This article was updated at 10:11 am on Friday, November 9. 

In stark juxtaposition with the boisterous political process we have recently witnessed in the United States is the choreographed 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which opened in Beijing this morning. During this weeklong meeting, the single party state will undergo its once-in-a-decade political transition, with President Hu Jintao handing the Party’s reigns to Vice President Xi Jinping.

Colloquially known as the “Eighteenth Big,” or “shiba da,” this is the first Communist Party Congress to be taking place in the age of Weibo, China’s three year-old Twitter equivalent, which has around 300 million users. Chinese social media commentators, however, are up against a much more foreboding foe than that which unnerved some of their American counterparts in the lead-up to election night: instead of the prospect of a great white fail whale, they are confronted with the reality of a Great Firewall.

For the 48 years leading up to August 20 of this year, reporters in Burma were required to submit their articles to state censors before publication, who would hand them back covered in red ink, keeping a tight grip on information that reached public attention. Now, not only has the government abolished this practice, but Burma could be preparing to allow private daily newspapers to emerge in coming months, said Ye Htut, the country’s Deputy Information Minister, on Monday.

“Our minister would like to see private dailies early next year,” Htut told Reuters, referring to the new Information Minister U Aung Kyi, who replaced a “hardliner” in a cabinet reshuffle last month. Currently, there are privately owned weekly journals and monthly magazines operating in Burma, but the four daily newspapers are all state-run.

Aung Kyi, whom Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper has referred to as a “reputed liberal,” apparently plans to introduce a new “Media Law” that all parties would accpet as well as a Press Council, both of which Htut has called “prerequisites” for the emergence of private dailies.

Twenty-three years after tanks surged into Beijing and the military opened fire on pro-democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square, Twitter’s primary Chinese counterpart Sina Weibo has snuffed out the virtual flames of remembrance. Talk of the tragedy of June 4, 1989, which has never been publically commemorated in mainland China, is now being censored in both state-controlled and social media.

Yesterday Sina Weibo, the largest and most popular microblogging site in China, deactivated a candle emoticon – formerly used to commemorate deaths reported in the news – when its "rumour control" squad noticed that netizens had begun to adopt it as a symbol of the Tiananmen anniversary, according to the Shanghaiist.

Soon afterward, the Olympic flame emoticon, designed to promote this summer’s games, was deployed as a replacement, and extinguished in turn.

Sina Weibo also blocked access to the search terms “candle” and “never forget,” and to references to the date of the crackdown that took place 23 years ago today such as “six four” (June 4) and “23,” reported The Next Web.

From China to Iran, government Internet censorship has become increasingly more prevalent, posing numerous concerns to advocates of cyber freedom. As we previously reported, there are now 40 governments that censor the Internet, up from only four in 2002. Yet one of the biggest promoters of Internet freedom—the United States—may in fact be enabling these restrictive governments in censoring and monitoring their citizens, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Censorship and surveillance require extensive software and hardware, many of which are actually created by US and other Western companies and sold to countries with restrictive internet policies, Foreign Policy said.

According to The Atlantic, such technologies can easily be used against citizen journalists in countries with little press freedom, preventing the dissemination of valuable data.