BEIJING — The Great Wall of China was built, rebuilt and maintained between the 5th and 16th centuries in order to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire from attacks. For some time now, the nation has been erecting a great firewall of information filtration in an attempt to further protect its citizenry from social influences which the government deems dangerous. One of the latest bricks in this virtual wall concerns the sale of personal computers. According to Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., computers sold within China will include mandatory filtering software, allegedly to provide parents with more power over what their children view online.
“If a father doesn’t want his son to be exposed to content related to basketball or drugs, he can block all Web sites related to those things,” Zhang Chenmin, general manager for software development company Jinhui informed The Associated Press.
Of course, it’s not fear of basketball that motivated the government’s decision to order all computers packed with filtering software, courtesy of Jinhui. The primary particulate to be caught in the filters is, of course, pornography.
“Green Dam-Youth Escort,” the software which won the government’s approval and funding, is still being loaded full of website URLs to block and could make China, with its 250 million plus netizens, the most sophisticated of all countries currently turning its back on the full inventory of internet options.
Naturally, pundits who are entirely comfortable with nudity being kept from the eyes of all ages fret that other information might also find itself targeted into practical non-existence.
Zhang assures those concerned about things like free speech that users can uninstall the software or configure it to allow otherwise forbidden site access, although they can not view the complete database of blocked sites. According to Zhang, no information is being broadcast to any third party concerning surfing habits.
Already blocked by the government are political sites, especially those that promote what it considers socially destructive such as democratic reform, Tibetan independence or challenges to the ruling party. Pornography is also banned and has been aggressively suppressed via the closing or blocking of nearly 2,000 sites.
Green Dam-Youth Escort will be available for free during its first year of availability. The Wall Street Journal reports that computer makers received a notice on May 19th from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology alerting them to a July 1st deadline for all systems to be pre-loaded with the software.
All primary and secondary schools within China were required to have the Green Dam program installed by the end of May and educators have been reminded to “fully realize the damage that harmful online information does to the physical and mental health of primary and secondary students.”
