Less than a week later, similar protests sprung up in Gansu, a north-western province, and on Hainan, the island off China's southern coast.

If the government is to be believed, this sequence of events is evidence of a new era of press freedom in the country. "This is the year with the most sudden incidents in decades, and it puts the news and publishing system to the test," says Liu Binjie, head of the General Administration for Press and Publishing, China's print media regulator.

Pointing to the snow storms that plagued south China in January, the unrest in Tibet, the earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Sichuan, the Olympics and, most recently, the need to respond to the global financial crisis, he draws the conclusion that the media have passed the test and this year has brought an "unprecedented opening" to news reporting in China.