Why does China even need online censorship anymore? It has already reached a decent level of wealth and education for its citizens.
Because the wealth is not equitably distributed. On one hand the rich in China are rolling in luxury and on the other hand Chinese assembly line factories have nets installed to prevent people from committing suicide.
Even the US heavily censors and molds the news they feed their population. There are people protesting in S.Korea asking for the removal of US troops stationed there, in light of growing cases of clashes with locals and sovereignty issues, but the US media twists the news and tells Muricans that the people of S.Korea are protesting for the US to provide free military umbrella to them and they are upset that the US might leave. In reality their administration has paid a heavy price and actually wants the US to leave.
Same with protests in Germany where the US has a data processing center for all its drone data links. The German civil society activists are protesting against having that building there, but the US tells its people "we provide them security and they are protesting because they don't want to pay for it". Then there is the case of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which were never found by any independent body other than the news anchors of Fox and CNN who have never been out of their studios.
China has taken a step in favor of its national security. India should have something like this in the pipeline. India recently sent notes to Facebook asking their data centers to be moved to India but they didn't oblige. These guys only understand the language of realpolitik.
People pay to have their advertisement up on Facebook, but the CIA doesn't even have to pay. US companies are so deeply linked with their intel departments that during an election, they can simply profile the political inclination of Indian voters based on their browsing habits and tune their algorithm to display newsfeeds which will shift their views in a certain direction. They can control the outcome of your elections without having to spend a dime. All the color revolutions in Ukraine, Russia (which were thwarted), the Arab spring, the Turkish coup had Facebook and Twitter's active co-operation. When Tunisia shut down the internet, Twitter came out with an SMS based tweeting service exclusively for Tunisia, within 8 hours. Why the itch to act so swiftly? is this not a political move?