The only reason Hexbear exists in the first place is due to western internet censorship. The West has managed to avoid the cudgel of internet censorship because it simply allows private firms to carry out this role, the same way the west has avoided the cudgel of "state media" by allowing private firms to saturate the media with sycophantic coverage.

I don't speak Chinese. I can't read Mandarin. I can't speak on what trends the Chinese government has clamped down on or allowed consistently over the past few decades, but a common mistake among westerners is that the "Great Firewall of China" is specifically about political censorship. More importantly, it is a matter of industrial policy and digital sovereignty. China has refused to allow Silicon Valley to gain a stranglehold on its digital infrastructure, and the west is eternally resentful over it. In doing so, they have created the space for their own domestic tech industry to thrive, while maintaining the ability to regulate it as needed. Today, the Chinese tech industry is the only serious competitor in the WORLD to Silicon Valley. They are in a much better situation than many global south countries, where the Internet is synonymous with Facebook and WhatsApp, or even eastern European countries which started out with blazing fast networks compared to the west, but have no digital sovereignty thanks to the consolidation of platforms.

For some years now in the UK there's been a country-wide ban on Russian news sites. Only western allowed.

See US's reaction to tiktok and Palestine coverage.