What protocol is it that routes around censorship, exactly?

What is the software that automatically prevents a server from being unplugged by a co-location facility? What about TCP/IP prevents a blogger from being beaten unconscious in front of his children, then taken away by plainclothes 'police'?

(I sometimes think that only a totalitarian government's propaganda minister would keep repeating this trope about routing around in the age of China's firewalls, etc.)