The excellent Danwei.org links to the China Central Television live coverage of Barack Obama's inaugural address...

Just moments after Obama said that the US had stood up to both fascism and communism, the station abruptly broke away from the speech and a rather surprised looking announcer  appeared to have to wake an analyst up to comment on an entirely unrelated point.

So, a censor poised, with twitchy fingers at the China Central Television headquarters with a long list of red alert words like 'communism'? It must have been a difficult list to write - 'freedom' and 'democracy' must have been contenders. But then you might as well not have bothered.

But what surprises me is that they were running the speech live at all - it inevitably means that any censorship is a few seconds too late. In this case, for instance, everyone watching knows that Barack Obama said that the US had stood up to communism. And - worse - knows that CCTV then attempted a somewhat awkward censorship of what came next. I would have expected them to run the speech with a slight delay - which is often what is done even in so-called live broadcasting here - so that they cut away before the 'c' word and had time to give the analyst a wake-up call.