Police in China’s eastern Shandong province have allowed the six-year-old daughter of a prominent blind activist to go to school, according to his supporters, in an apparent victory for Chinese Internet activists that comes even as Beijing considers stricter online controls.

Chen Guangcheng, who has campaigned against forced abortions due to China’s one-child policy, was released from prison in September 2010 after a more than four-year sentence on charges of disturbing public order. But since then he and his family have been confined to his home by authorities without charge in what’s known in Chin as soft detention.

The case has prompted an unusual outpouring of support from China’s increasingly feisty Internet community, which has called for the release of the 39-year-old Mr. Chen, a self-trained legal expert who has suffered from blindness since childhood. On Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service, users have posted photos of Mr. Chen as well as photos of themselves wearing dark sunglasses as he does.

In some cases, in addition to wearing sun glasses, supporters have photographed themselves holding signs saying “We need to have light, we need to have honesty” (要有光，要有诚), a reference to the two Chinese characters that make up Mr. Chen’s given name.

Authorities have blocked searches for Mr. Chen’s name on Weibo, though posts about him and his case can be easily found. A number of his supporters have tried to visit him, with some saying they have been beaten by thugs surrounding his house.

“To obtain this type of progress, Chinese web users and Guangcheng’s supporters have paid a huge price,” said Zeng Jinyan, a human rights activist.

She says she received confirmation this week that Mr. Chen’s daughter, Chen Kesi, was allowed to begin attending school recently, but has been escorted by security guards to and from the family’s home in the village of Dongshigu, near the city of Linyi, about halfway between Beijing and Shanghai on China’s east coast. While the family was under house arrest last year, authorities had previously prevented the girl from attending school, Ms. Zeng said.

The family is kept out of communication and couldn’t be reached. A woman who answered the phone on Thursday at a local police station in Linyi said she had never heard of Mr. Chen.

Unlike many cases involving imprisoned or detained rights activists in China, domestic outrage appears to outweigh international attention. “The fundamental unfairness of that really strikes a chord with many Chinese citizens,” said Phelim Kine, a researcher with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong.

That dissatisfaction has been manifested online in unusual ways. In one case, a newly arrived U.S. embassy official in Beijing created a Weibo account. Within days of his first message last week, a simple greeting and introduction of himself, the post was overrun with nearly 2,000 comments, many of which expressed support for Mr. Chen and criticized the Chinese government’s handling of the case. Hundreds more comments in which users responded by writing “Hello, I am Chen Guangcheng” were deleted shortly after being posted.

Growing online activism for Mr. Chen and his family came as the Communist Party’s Central Committee met this week in Beijing. Managing culture and society were main topics, according to state-run media. China is likely to continue tightening Internet controls in the lead-up to its once-a-decade leadership transition in 2012, analysts say.

Weibo, which has more than 200 million users, already limits searches for sensitive keywords and deletes some posts altogether, according to users. The head of China’s Internet watchdog last week called for a strengthening of regulations over microblogs so they can “serve the works of the party and the people,” according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Beijing on Thursday responded to criticism earlier this week by the U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization, Michael Punke, that U.S. Internet companies in China faced challenges in China resulting from its national firewall.

The purpose of China’s Internet management “is to safeguard public interests and to promote the Internet’s sound development,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu at daily press briefing. “This is also international practice.”

Note: An earlier version of this article said Mr. Chen’s daughter began attending school this week.

–Brian Spegele. Follow him on Twitter @bspegele.

Annual inflows of foreign direct investment rose to nearly $108 billion in 2008.

China continues to lose arable land because of erosion and economic development.

The People’s Republic of China is the world’s second largest economy after the United States by both nominal GDP ($5 trillion in 2009) and by purchasing power parity ($8.77 trillion in 2009).

Some economists believe that Chinese economic growth has been in fact understated during much of the 1990s and early 2000s, failing to fully factor in the growth driven by the private sector and that the extent at which China is dependent on exports is exaggerated.

Technology, labor productivity, and incomes have advanced much more rapidly in industry than in agriculture.

A report by UBS in 2009 concluded that China has experienced total factor productivity growth of 4 per cent per year since 1990, one of the fastest improvements in world economic history.

China’s ongoing economic transformation has had a profound impact not only on China but on the world.

On top of this, foreign direct investment (FDI) this year was set to “surpass $100 billion”, compared to $90 billion last year, ministry officials predicted.

Last year was the eighth consecutive year that the nation’s ODI had grown.

China reiterated the nation’s goals for the next decade – increasing market share of pure-electric and plug-in electric autos, building world-competitive auto makers and parts manufacturers in the energy-efficient auto sector as well as raising fuel-efficiency to world levels.

China’s challenge in the early 21st century will be to balance its highly centralized political system with an increasingly decentralized economic system.

Agriculture is by far the leading occupation, involving over 50% of the population, although extensive rough, high terrain and large arid areas – especially in the west and north – limit cultivation to only about 10% of the land surface.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and wheat and a major producer of sweet potatoes, sorghum, millet, barley, peanuts, corn, soybeans, and potatoes.

Fish and pork supply most of the animal protein in the Chinese diet.

There are also extensive iron-ore deposits; the largest mines are at Anshan and Benxi, in Liaoning province.

China is among the world’s four top producers of antimony, magnesium, tin, tungsten, and zinc, and ranks second (after the United States) in the production of salt, sixth in gold, and eighth in lead ore.

China also has extensive hydroelectric energy potential, notably in Yunnan, W Sichuan, and E Tibet, although hydroelectric power accounts for only 5% of the country’s total energy production.

The iron and steel industry is organized around several major centers (including Anshan, one of the world’s largest), but thousands of small iron and steel plants have also been established throughout the country.

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Social Media Helps China Activists Score Victory for Blind Lawyer