Its been a while for me too, I lived in Beijing for a little over 3 years and it has been my experience that access to western media was not all that difficult. There was a general consensus among my friends (mostly academics) that this was by design as the state saw a need for at-least some dissenting discussion among an "intellectual upperclass" to prevent stagnation. I find it amusing that the state controlled news media sounded more like an epic drama then anything we in the west would consider "political news".