Asian media are slowly winning the battle against authoritarianism and breaking the shackles of censorship thanks largely to technology and economic advancements, industry analysts and watchdogs say.
However they caution government-imposed and self-censorship continue to plague the region while corruption, intimidation and violence often descend on the press as soon as freedoms are gained.
China and Vietnam continue to be among the worst offenders, with Beijing's current crackdown on the feisty press in the south of the country illustrating the communist rulers' determination to quash attempts at free expression.
"In both countries obviously all the communists have left is political control," Bangkok-based Asian consultant for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Lin Neumann, said.
"They are doing everything they can to keep people from using the Internet and the press to challenge the government's authority," Neumann said.
According to the CPJ, China is the world's leading jailer of journalists with 38 members of the press currently imprisoned.
Reporters without Borders said in its just-released annual media summary for last year that 48 "cyber-dissidents" were now languishing in Chinese jails.
But Neumann and other industry monitors agree the Internet, mobile phone text messaging and other new technologies are gradually overcoming the scourge of censorship across Asia, not only in China.
"It's difficult to exaggerate how extensively it has changed the whole system ... it's not just the Internet, it's the whole means of communication," Political and Economic Risk Consultancy managing director Bob Broadfoot said.
In China, authorities have reacted by filtering e-mails, blocking Web sites and ordering Internet service providers to censor their own sites, as well as orchestrating the high-profile and intimidatory arrests of on-line dissidents.
"The arrests of a few prominent Internet users who distribute politically sensitive articles serve as a potent warning to all Internet users," the CPJ's senior research associate for Asia, Sophie Beach, said.
But Neumann was adamant the Chinese authorities would not be able to hold back the tide.
"The country's going so fast and there's so much money, people are owning computers and accessing the Internet for business and personal use ... it's not possible to micro-manage what people are doing online and eventually I think the party will just give up," he said.
Elsewhere in Asia there are already many successes such as malaysiakini.com, which has defied widespread government control of the media in Malaysia to become the most popular political Web site in the country.
In Singapore authorities are increasingly being forced to respond to dissent in Internet chat forums that cannot be expressed in the strictly regulated traditional forms of media.
Even in Laos, where the communist regime has complete control over the press, external pro-democracy activists have beaten authorities to the domain name of the major state-run newspaper and publish independent news on vientianetimes.com.
Neumann also pointed to the growing importance of short message service (SMS), or text, messaging on mobile phones, with the technology helping to spread unfiltered news about the SARS in China when authorities first tried to play the crisis down last year.
RSS