Stories like this are getting to be old hat.

A blogger is arrested after being nominated for a "freedom of expression" award. Chat sites are closed for allowing dissent. To many western eyes the Middle Kingdom seems secure, a totalitarian state which works and will keep working until its economic success buries us.

That's not true, although I no longer believe that the Internet, by itself, will make the difference.

Instead, it's stories like this that will turn the tide. Harbin, a city of 3.8 million (bigger than Chicago), had its water system completely shut down because of a chemical spill. Hundreds of villages nearby have been evacuated, the BBC reports, because of some 100 million tons of benzene which were released into the river after a chemical plant exploded.

The Western media is focused on the fact that China is actually allowing its state-owned media to report the event. But there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of smaller spills occurring every year throughout the country. The skies above Beijing are a sickly yellow, and it's environmental issues that are the most common cause for political protest throughout the country.

In this, as in the West, China is traveling down a well-trod path. And it's a path that has led, in every country, in the same direction -- democratization.

The Western environmental movement did not begin in the early 1970s. It began a century or more earlier. It began in such forms as labor agitation, in journalism that exposed urban horrors, and in political demands that the rights of workers be recognized, and accounted for, as natons developed.

China appears to be containing these pressures. But appearances are often deceiving. Reagan-era analysts never dreamt the Berlin Wall would fall, until it did. Pressure that is not released leads to explosions. China is not immune to the laws of nature or of human nature.

The Internet will speed this change along, but it will not cause nor provoke this change.