Censorship Showdown in China

By Tom Dunlap

China continues to crank up its attempts to censor what its citizens can see online.

The latest news is that China's Internet watchdogs have fired another salvo at the Chinese-language of version of Google, saying the site disseminates "pornographic and vulgar information."

This latest warning is yet another indicator that the Communist Party is working overtime to stifle dissent in a year of important anniversaries, which included the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protest in 1989.

According to Reuters today:

The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center said it had complained twice to Google about the "vulgar links" available through its search engine at www.google.cn.

"Google China has not conducted the oversight required according to China's laws and regulations, and a large volume of foreign internet pornographic information has entered our borders through this Web site," the center said.

It urged Google to conduct a "thorough clean-up" of its Web pages and also urged authorities to step in and punish the company.

Google and other major Web sites have previously been given a public dressing down for not being quick enough to wipe out targeted content.

Before this latest salvo, the Chinese government went even further, ordering all new personal computers to carry Internet filtering software. Yesterday, there were reports that China was relaxing that plan, but that turned out to be bogus, The New York Times reported today:

American computer makers say the Chinese government has not backed down from a requirement that Internet censorship software be installed on all computers sold in China after July 1, despite reports this week that the rule had been relaxed.

In a further sign that Chinese officials are trying to assert more control over the Internet, the city of Beijing wants to recruit 10,000 volunteers by the end of the summer to monitor Internet content, said an employee of the Beijing government's Spiritual Civilization Office.

... Many people say the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, will be used to block Web sites with politically unacceptable content even though officials insist the software will be used primarily to censor pornography.

Computer experts also discovered severe weaknesses in the software that would allow hackers to hijack the computers of people using Green Dam.

Meanwhile, the anti-censorship crowd is fired up and getting more organized all the time, as we saw with the incredible events surrounding the Iranian election. Some reports say that Iranian protesters got a lot of help from Chinese dissidents. It'll be fascinating to see how the censorship fight amps up in the world's fastest-growing economy.