BEIJING -- As basketball fans geared up for the U.S.-China pairing on August 10, a banner headline in the China Daily predicted more than a billion fans would watch the game. There were watch parties everywhere -- at ex-pat bars, local dives, even the hotel room two doors down from me. And in the lobby, even the security guard working the graveyard shift could watch Yao Ming. For several hours, he kept one eye on the door, and one eye on his cell phone, which he watched for scores, play-by-play reports and even video highlights.

With the opening of the first Apple store in China, there's been a lot of talk about when the retailer will finally negotiate an Asian contract for its iPhone 3G. But really, why all the fuss? The Chinese market is already saturated with hacked iPhones, complete knockoffs and, most importantly, domestic cell phones that can outperform Apple on its best day.

Internet browsing and email access, until recently only available to the elitist BlackBerry crowd, are standard-issue on most Chinese cell phones. Here, it's not just wealthy businessmen and yuppie college students who feel a constant need to be connected. It's people like Guo Jing, the security guard at our hotel watching Yao Ming on the very tiny screen of his cell phone. His position only pays about 2,000 RMB a month (around $300), and his phone cost almost as much. Jing is not alone, either. Almost all of the security guards at Renmin have made similar investments.

Phone-Driven Cell Market

With more than 360 million users, China Mobile does provide almost 70 percent of wireless service in mainland China, but like in Europe, the wireless communication market here is phone-driven, not plan-driven. As a tourist, you can walk into any one of a dozen mobile phone shops on the street and purchase a SIM card that works with the cell phone you already have.

In a truly bizarre blending of tradition with technology, how much you'll pay depends largely on the cell phone number you're willing to take. While the Westerner might scan the list for the number closest to his birthday, wedding anniversary or garage door code, the Easterner is looking for lucky number eight. Because the number is said to bring good fortune (08/08/08 at 8:08 p.m., anyone?), customers pay a premium for numbers that have a lot of eights.

Of course, the Beijing Organizing Committee-Olympic Games (BOCOG) had SIM cards waiting for us when we got on the ground in China. There are no eights in my new number, but there aren't any fours, either. (Because the Chinese word for "four" sounds a lot like the Chinese word for "death," the number is considered unlucky.)

Along with our new SIM cards, BOCOG handed us new Chinese cell phones as well, but they're not quite TV ready. In fact, I half expected the tiny gadget to dispense candy, not to make calls. It didn't help that the thing bore an uncanny resemblance to the Nokia S110 (you know, the one with the endless stream of colored face plates) my sister carried in high school. Even in a room of English-speaking Chinese volunteers, every request I got for help setting up voice-mail was met with a blank stare. Finally, someone explained to all of us that voice-mail isn't popular in China. Our venue supervisors would be in contact with us via text message.

Here it seems a little odd to have your boss text you, especially when texts come at weird times. For instance, the Chinese concept of acceptable text times seems to be very different than that in America. Kevin, our manager, would often send us texts at one or two in the morning trying to change the time we were all supposed to meet the next day. This was fine if we were planning to meet in the afternoon and he wanted to push the time back an hour or two, but it was somewhat less effective when he'd want to meet at, say, 8:30 a.m. instead of 9:30 a.m. Unless you heard your phone go off in the middle of the night, you wouldn't get the message until 8:30, when you had your alarm set for in the first place.

This, I've learned, is by far the norm in China. Every time I step on the subway, I feel like I'm entering a bizarre scene in some electronic catalog (with Nokia providing the largest number of phones by far) where able-thumbed passengers convert the Roman alphabet into Pinyin and into Chinese characters at rapid speed.

It's not that I haven't seen my best friend's fingers work text message magic so quickly before, it's just that she's using a rundown flip phone that's similar to mine. My Dad (businessman) recently bought his first BlackBerry, and my brother (yuppie) has had an iPhone since they hit the shelves last summer, but most of my friends still use a somewhat clunky cameraphone. Email and Internet access? Only if they convinced their parents to spring for an upgraded plan.

More Cell Phones Than Laptops

On the University of Missouri's campus in Columbia where I go to school, you're more likely to see students checking their email on their laptops than their phones. But here at Renmin, where there's a campus-wide wireless network, only about one-third of students have laptops, so it's the opposite.

Likewise, when I'm checking headlines online at the New York Times, my Chinese counterpart is probably skimming an SMS message with the same information from Chinese news sources. China Mobile users can pay a small fee to receive headlines on their phones, and during the Olympics, a separate dissemination service keeps subscribers up-to-date on Games news. The ads in the subway have me curious, but I'm not quite sure I'm ready for news on the tiny screen of my cell phone. After all, I held out for an entire month before getting a cell phone charm, an absolute Chinese must-have.

Plenty of students in my group have swapped their usual SIM cards for their Chinese SIM card because they couldn't stand the stripped down model BOCOG provided. Journalists constantly complain about the lack of features and familiarity with the phones they've acquired during their brief stay.

I can't blame them: I've spent plenty of time in the last year glancing woefully from my inexpensive Samsung to friends' powerful iPhones. I've told myself a dozen times that as a journalism student, I too could benefit from 24/7 access to email, but at the same time, I know I'm sitting in front of my computer anyway nine times out of ten. I've always resisted the urge to upgrade, and in China, the tradition continues. Maybe I just haven't had long enough to adjust to the 2 a.m. text messages from my work supervisor with instructions on where to go and what to do when I wake up.

Elle Moxley is a student at the University of Missouri pursuing dual degrees in journalism and sociology. Currently, she is living in Beijing, China, spending two months working for the Olympic News Service at the XXIX Olympic Games.

Photo of Chinese texters by Kimberli via Flickr.

BEIJING -- Journalists scrambling to make Games-time deadlines might not make it to Badaling or Juyongguan during their trip overseas, but they're sure to become familiar with China's other Great Wall: the Great Firewall, that is. On July 31, Olympic officials admitted the International Olympic Committee had not yet secured unfettered Internet access to foreign journalists, leaving everyone to wonder, yet again, what exactly China meant when it accepted the 2008 Olympic Bid with the promise to allow the press to report freely.

Chinese officials maintained that access for foreign journalists was sufficient because information on sports and athletics remain readily available. Just the sensitive material (read: interesting and newsworthy) was off limits. However, after howls of protest from many in the media, the censored web was loosened a bit on August 2. No public announcement, no explanation, just a few more sites stripped from the forbidden list. Still, crisis averted -- or was it? Even after the news slowly spread, foreign journalists remained incensed about the lack of action prior to August 2.

When the news of the censored Net access for journalists broke, one of my friends posed a question: were journalists who accepted these restrictions for the opportunity to report on the Games sacrificing their credibility? It's an interesting question. As late as mid-July, IOC president Jacques Rogge continued to promise Internet access without censorship to journalists planning to report in Beijing. Eleventh hour announcements make impassioned protest difficult with visas long since secured and plane tickets already bought.

Of course, ordinary Chinese citizens -- and China boasts more netizens than any other country in the world -- are subject to an even stricter censorship regime, with sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube being variously blocked and unblocked over the past few years.

The High Cost of Connecting

But forget access to information on Tibet for just a second -- let's just examine access to the Internet in general for foreign media. Beijing has promised state-of-the-art media facilities to visiting journalists, but the ability to log onto the web will set reporters back approximately $500 and up. A fixed IP and access to the Games-time information system will add even more to the cost.

It's hardly a problem for large papers able to foot the bill for their team of reporters. But what about everyone else? Twenty-four computers offer free Internet access from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. each day. The newly constructed media village will house about 7,000 journalists and media support staff. This scenario conjures up images reminiscent of last week's queues for the remaining Olympic tickets. Asking journalists to pay for their own usage isn't unreasonable, but demanding $500 for a service that costs the average Chinese family about $20 for the same length of time is.

Many enterprising journalists have taken matters into their own hands, turning the Papa John's with free Wi-Fi across the street into their unofficial center of operations. Other early hold-outs to the overpriced Internet are accepting their fate and coughing up the big bucks for reliable service.

How important is the Internet to today's journalist? I can tell you I have six browser windows and over 20 tabs open right now in Safari to help me research and collect my thoughts, but no one needs me to do the math for them. The occasional network crash forces me to fly solo from time to time, but it leaves Word documents hideously flagged with things to Google once everything's back online.

Fortunately, my accommodations include free Internet access. Of course, it's only been in the last week that Blogger and WordPress have run with much reliability. When I arrived in early July, I needed a VPN client to connect to the blog I was writing for my parents back home. Sometimes I could connect; other times, I couldn't.

What Did Journalists Expect?

That's the thing about the Great Firewall -- there's no master list or helpful placeholder page to tell you what's restricted. There's just the maddening sensation of waiting forever for a "server is not responding" error message. As for Amnesty International:"http:www.amnesty.org" (and other recently unblocked sites), I can now access them from my non-Media Village connection, too. However, a search for "Falun Gong," China's banned spiritual movement, kicked me offline the other night and forced me to restart my computer. Even more maddening is the number of sites you wouldn't expect to be blocked -- for instance, access to my online banking account.

With the situation smooted over somewhat, and most foreign journalists already in Beijing, it's too late to hand in press accreditation to protest Net censorship. Perhaps, more importantly, journalists should be asking themselves why they expected anything different. After all, the 2001 announcement of the successful Beijing bid -- and successive promise of press freedom -- came on the same day CBS reported suppression of footage on a banned Chinese religious movement.

In the months leading up to the Games, numerous organizations attempted to brief journalists on the realities of reporting in China, but few seemed to head the warning. Journalists who today want to call China's successful bid and resultant promises a farce might be correct, but they fail to see the bigger picture.

If the world were watching Paris or Toronto gear up for the Games, they would not be asking China about Internet censorship, let alone human rights. A modern China? Indeed, and all the scrutiny that comes with it. Outcry over Internet censorship yielded real results. With more tools for a free press than they had even a week ago, the pens (and keyboards) of foreign journalists are likely to produce others.

Elle Moxley is a student at the University of Missouri pursuing dual degrees in journalism and sociology. Currently, she is living in Beijing, China, spending two months working for the Olympic News Service at the XXIX Olympic Games.

Elle Moxley is a journalism student at the University of Missouri who is a media volunteer for the Olympics in Beijing. She will be writing occasional reports about the scene there for MediaShift over the next few weeks.

We wrestle hi-def video cameras into our carry-on luggage, brandish SLRs at tourist attractions and arrange "Skype dates" with significant others half a world away. Blogging is the acceptable (and perhaps preferred) method of communicating with home, and the Internet at our hotel strains under the weight of so many Facebook photo uploads in so few hours. We are journalism students at the University of Missouri and volunteers at the XXIX Olympic Games, self-proclaimed new media experts and hopeless foreigners all at the same time.

Last August, I sat in a packed auditorium back home in Missouri eager to learn more about the chance to work with the Olympic News Service (ONS). ONS needed native-English speakers to staff help desks, haul equipment and hang out in the mixed zone, hoping to wrestle quotes from winning athletes as they passed. I don't really watch sports, but there's something about the Olympic Games I find intensely interesting. Maybe it's the sense of global unity. Maybe it's the spirit of competition. Maybe it's the bizarre draw of sports like curling, which my mom and I stayed up watching until 3 a.m. during the Turin games in 2006. I immediately counted myself in.

But when I triumphantly announced my plans to study abroad in Beijing, my parents (who I typically dismiss as somewhat alarmist) immediately began to question how much freedom we'd have as journalists in China. I don't consider myself naive or uneducated; I probably have a better sense of the political situation here than they do. But I also knew that as a stipulation in their bid for the Olympic Games, China had to guarantee access to foreign journalists.

And in theory they did, issuing a decree promising press freedom from the start of 2007 through the Paralympics. Early reports indicated foreign journalists still met with some degree of difficulty as they entered China, but I remained optimistic. Each time someone asked me his or her own variation of "China...are you sure?" I became increasingly indignant.

"The Olympics are China's chance to prove itself to the world," I argued to them. "Journalists will have their freedom during the Games. You'll see." Today, as I navigate Beijing's packed streets with a knowledge of Mandarin that begins and ends with xie xie ("thank you"), I'm not so sure. I might not speak the language, but I can still read the signs.

The Lens Turned on Us

With 59 students, we were the largest group of English volunteers the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) invited to Beijing. China Central Television and China Daily were waiting when we arrived.

For the first several days we were in Beijing, we couldn't make a move without crossing the path of a videocamera, and before we could depart on BOCOG-arranged tours to all the local attractions (think Great Wall, Ming Tombs and Summer Palace), we had to wait almost an hour for CCTV to arrive. For a busload of journalism students, it was a difficult delay to understand. If you're late in Columbia, Missouri, you miss the story, and it doesn't matter if the event you're covering is 30 minutes away in Jefferson City. You still have to provide your own transportation.

The inclusion of Chinese journalists in our activities and outings represents the same unique cooperation between the government and the media we saw when we visited the People's Daily. Though the online version of the state-sponsored paper offers a marriage of text, video and multimedia we can only hope to achieve at the our journalism school's daily, the Columbia Missourian, the accolades that adorn our walls are clippings of old articles and awards. At the People's Daily, modern architecture meets framed photos of high-ranking Chinese officials on tours of the facility. As our guides are quick to point out, the frequent visits indicate the importance of the People's Daily in the eyes of the government. Something tells me that the Columbia City Council would rather we just stay out.

Mao Zedong's portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square, which we visited on a rainy Saturday. It's not usually this wet in Beijing, but Chinese meteorologists have been seeding the clouds in preparation for the Olympic Games. Forcing it to rain now helps clear smog from the skies and also makes it less likely it will rain through Opening Ceremony. Our tour guide didn't have a lot to say about the rioting that erupted in summer 1989, but one of the students on our trip who studied the Tiananmen Square Massacre provided us with an impromptu history lesson.

Whispers on the Tour

One of the main shopping districts in Beijing might derive its name from an ancient trade route, yet English is the dominant language of the Silk Market, and bartering feels surprisingly like capitalism. But like the People's Daily, the suburbs of northern Beijing tell a different story.

These are not the manicured lawns and large cookie cutter houses of my hometown of Kansas City. Blue signs advertise Xiangtang Village as a stop on the "Olympic Country Tour," the one BOCOG arranged for us. We spend our morning at the water purification plant (this in a city where we've been told not to drink the water because of the potentially dangerous level of lead in the pipes), and in the afternoon, we depart behind a police escort to a place that has seen "marvelous changes...especially under the leadership of Wenshan Zhang, the General Party Branch Secretary of Xiangtang Village" (this according to the official literature we've received).

Our group of journalism students remains skeptical as we are ushered through newly built courtyards and gardens of fake flowers. Over one-third of villagers live in new housing projects.

"What happened to the old houses?" someone asks.

"They were deserted," our BOCOG tour guide says, her voice awash in mystery.

My friend elbows me. "Funny," she says, "how 'deserted' and 'forced to leave' have the same end result."

We visit an "ancient" temple; we learn through the subtleties of speech that this is actually a replica. By the end of the day, we are calling this "Propaganda Tour 2008." I'm not sure how our friends from CCTV will edit out such whispers.

Is this the free and open Beijing promised when the city received its bid to host the Games? Large digital clocks throughout the city are counting down to the start of the Games, but I'm not sure how much will change in the 11th hour. As the clocks tick past the crucial one month mark, every major news source seems eager to comment on the Human Rights Watch report that questions the reality of an open and free foreign press in China. As for me, I'm glad they're so eager to comment and link to it, because it gives me access the Chinese government will not -- in Beijing, the report lies just beyond reach, blocked behind a firewall.

Elle Moxley is a student at the University of Missouri pursuing dual degrees in journalism and sociology. Currently, she is living in Beijing, China, spending two months working for the Olympic News Service at the XXIX Olympic Games.