Today the Christian Science Monitor profiles Liu Di, the Chinese “cyber-dissident,” and in so doing smashes the myth — the lie — that the CCP is slowly but steadily increasing press freedoms.

Things are getting worse, not better. The reporter notes how publications that for a moment gave us hope that things were really changing, have been pressured and threatened into silence.

“People talk about changes in the Chinese media,” says a Beijing-based media expert. “But it goes up and down. All political news still goes through the state. When it comes to important questions, there isn’t any independent media.”

Liu Di sounds like one brave lady. I have boundless admiration for heroes like this who are willing to say what they believe, letting the cards fall where they may. And in China, we all know where the cards are going to fall:

A third-year psychology student at Beijing Normal University, Ms. Liu formed an artists club, wrote absurdist essays in the style of dissident Eastern-bloc writers of the 1970s, and ran a popular web-posting site. Admirers cite her originality and humor: In one essay Liu ironically suggests all club members go to the streets to sell Marxist literature and preach Lenin’s theory, like “real Communists.” In another, she suggests everyone tell no lies for 24 hours. In a series of “confessions” she says that China’s repressive national-security laws are not good for the security of the nation.

If that doesn’t merit a decade in a Chinese prison, what does?

From my own experience in China, where all I did was work with the media, I know that there are pockets of press freedom, and some editors still push the envelope. But this is more likely to occur in smaller, more “vertical” publications — those with a relatively small readership in a specific niche industry. These publications are far less likely to be read by government censors (and even if they are, their sphere of influence is so small they may escape censorship).

These are drops in the ocean. In its last paragraphs, the article acknowledge the crumbs of anecdotal evidence of “improvement” (very small crumbs) but its conclusions are unequivocal:

But these are exceptions. The rest – labor activists, upstart college students, journalists, writers, intellectuals, professors, dissidents, religious believers with too much spunk, those who stand out in a too-public fashion or attract too much attention – are warned, or arrested. In this reading of China, free expression is not improving in the short- and midterm.

Despite some changes of style, more arrests are taking place, and ordinary Chinese are still strictly censoring themselves.

I’ll say it again: Reform is as reform does. Anyone who wants to believe the spoon-fed CCP mantra that China’s press is becoming freer is entitled to do so. But the evidence doesn’t back up such lofty phrases; just ask the “cyber-dissidents” sitting alone in Chinese jail cells this very moment.