From Osnos' Age of Ambition:

I lived in China for eight years, and I watched this age of ambition take shape. Above all, it is a time of plenty— the crest of a transformation one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created modern Britain. The Chinese people no longer want for food— the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976— but this is a ravenous era of a different kind, a period when people have awoken with a hunger for new sensations, ideas, and respect. China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, movies, beer, and platinum; it is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined.

And:

In the event that these censorship efforts failed, the Party was testing a weapon of last resort: the OFF switch. On July 5, 2009, members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority in the far western city of Urumqi protested police handling of a brawl between Hans and Uighurs. The protests turned violent, and nearly two hundred people died, most of them Han, who had been targeted for their ethnicity. Revenge attacks on Uighur neighborhoods followed, and in an effort to prevent people from communicating and organizing, the government abruptly disabled text messages, cut long-distance phone lines, and shut off Internet access almost entirely. The digital blackout lasted ten months, and the economic effects were dramatic: exports from Xinjiang, the Uighur autonomous region, plummeted more than 44 percent. But the Party was willing to accept immense economic damage to smother what it considered a political threat. In the event of a broader crisis someday, China probably has too many channels in and out to impose so complete a blackout on a national scale, but even a limited version would have a profound effect.

And:

On October 8, 2010, ten months after Liu Xiaobo was convicted, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights.” He was the first Chinese citizen to receive the award, not counting the Dalai Lama, who had lived for decades in exile. The award to Liu Xiaobo drove Chinese leaders into a rage; the government denounced Liu’s award as a “desecration” of Alfred Nobel’s legacy. For years, China had coveted a Nobel Prize as a validation of the nation’s progress and a measure of the world’s acceptance. The obsession with the prize was so intense that scholars had named it the “Nobel complex,” and each fall they debated China’s odds of winning it, like sports fans in a pennant race. There was once a television debate called “How Far Are We from a Nobel Prize?”

When the award was announced, most Chinese people had never heard of Liu, so the state media made the first impression; it splashed an article across the country reporting that he earned his living “bad-mouthing his own country.” The profile was a classic of the form: it described him as a collector of fine wines and porcelain, and it portrayed him telling fellow prisoners, “I’m not like you. I don’t lack for money. Foreigners pay me every year, even when I’m in prison.” Liu “spared no effort in working for Western anti-China forces” and, in doing so, “crossed the line of freedom of speech into crime.”

For activists, the news of the award was staggering. “Many broke down in tears, even uncontrollable sobbing,” one said later. In Beijing, bloggers, lawyers, and scholars gathered in the back of a restaurant to celebrate, but police arrived and detained twenty of them. When the announcement was made, Han Han, on his blog, toyed with censors and readers; he posted nothing but a pair of quotation marks enclosing an empty space. The post drew one and a half million hits and more than 28,000 comments.