TDI | Outsourcing | Edinburgh: China Learns Its Limits in Pullback on Web Filter

China Learns Its Limits in Pullback on Web Filter
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FreeNewsFeed.com on 03 July, 2009 01:00:07
 
When China's authoritarian leaders are on top of their game, they can make
awesome feats look breathlessly easy, lacing the coasts with bullet trains,
throwing up vast airports seemingly overnight, plopping scores of power plants
on the landscape like some giant farmer setting out rice shoots.
When they are off their game, it becomes apparent that managing a billion-plus
people is not easy at all, even with near-absolute power.
Which is why, some here say, the government issued an embarrassing last-minute
postponement on Tuesday of a plan to require Internet-censorship software on
every computer sold here.
Technology experts said on Wednesday that the turnabout appeared to be the
product of miscalculation and poor execution by a government bureaucracy whose
reach -- a penchant for ratcheting up security -- exceeded its grasp.
That China's leaders have pressed for extraordinary restrictions on free speech
and political protest this year, amid a stretch of politically sensitive
anniversaries, could have led the program's backers to assume they had more
support at the top echelons of the government than actually existed.
"We outsiders tend to perceive the Chinese government as a monolith," said
David Wolf, a technology consultant and blogger on Chinese technology matters
based in Beijing.
"But it's precisely these kinds of policies that underscore that there are
actually a whole range of groups inside the government making policies, to a
certain extent, without regard to broader issues."
Few outside the government know clearly how the plan to require censorship
software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, materialized.
The government's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which
sponsored the program, has described Green Dam as a software program that
blocks pornographic and violent content on computers.
Some reports suggest, however, that the developers of the software had close
connections to China's security apparatus and that the proposal to require the
software enjoyed support there.
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