Prior to the summer Olympics, China pledged to free up Web sites. It unblocked some sites but failed to comply fully with its promise.

Now, it is even re-blocking many of the sites again, another reminder that China's notion of how to become "modern" is a peculiar one.

The Hong Kong-based periodical Asiaweek says its Chinese-language site, along with those of the BBC and Voice of America, are now being blocked. Also blocked is the site of the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao.

Rebecca MacKinnon of Hong Kong University told the New York Times: "It does appear that in the last week a lot of things got reblocked that were unblocked during the Olympics."

In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters the government was within its rights to ban certain Web sites that are considered in violation of Chinese law.

But as MacKinnon observed, Chinese law can be extremely broad. For 30 years, China has pushed toward modernization, but the government still fails to appreciate that an essential feature of modern societies is the free flow of information.