Out Dam Youth! China Explains Web Censorship
The software, "Green Dam-Youth Escort," is needed to protect Chinese citizens from pornography and violence, government officials explained. All new computers will have to comply with the directive as of July 1.
"The purpose of this is to effectively manage harmful material for the public and prevent it from being spread," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told the BBC. "The Chinese government pushes forward the healthy development of the Internet. But it lawfully manages the Internet."
However, it's not clear what the government considers "harmful" or "lawful."
According to The Wall Street Journal which broke the news Monday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's notice translated from Chinese to English reads: "Green Dam-Youth Escort" software should be preloaded on the computer's hard drive or an accompanying CD-ROM, and as a backup file on the recovery partition and recovery CD-ROM."
While newsworthy, the development isn't exactly shocking. The Chinese government routinely censors information aimed at its 300 million Web surfers, especially content that is critical of politics, including human rights content posted by dissidents.
As far back as 1997, the Chinese government issued mandates limiting Web content to stop citizens from exposing state secrets, "harmful information," pornography and violence.
At the time, Zhu Entao, the Assistant Minister for Public Security, said that the Internet monitoring measure was also supposed to protect against computer hacking and viruses, Reuters said. Violations would result in criminal charges and fines.
The Ministry of Public Security also instituted a government and surveillance operation known as the Great Firewall of China, or the Golden Shield Project, which filters IP addresses and URLs.
According to a watchdog Web site, www.greatfirewallofchina.org , there are an estimated 30,000 Chinese civil servants monitoring Internet traffic and blocking content that is deemed undesirable. The group said that popular Western sites such as Flickr and Twitter have on-and-off-again access; when the sites have been blocked a Web page says they are undergoing "technical maintenance."
Microsoft's new search engine Bing is also blocked, said China news-aggregating site Danwei.
Video sharing site YouTube was blocked in March reportedly after a video was posted by supporters of the Dalai Lama.
Qin Gang defended the action and told The Times: "Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact, it is just the opposite."