China forced to abandon web filtering software

 Official China news agency, Xinhua, announced on July 1 that China
 had delayed plans to install controversial internet software on all
 new computers to be sold in China. On 14 August, the Guardian newspaper
 reported that China's Industry and Information Minister Li Yizhong
 confirmed that plans to make the implementation of Green Dam compulsory
 had been scrapped, saying that the Chinese Government "respected the
 choice of individuals who do not install it."
 
 The BBC referred to the move as a rare and embarrassing climbdown
 for the Chinese government. It follows a torrent of criticism
 from China’s rapidly increasing community of internet users, or so-
 called ‘netizens’, who were enraged at plans to add controls on
 to one of the world’s most heavily-controlled internet systems.
 Pressure was also brought to bear by the US government which had
 earlier lodged a formal complaint with the Chinese authorities. In
 a press release following the despatch of letters to Chinese
 government ministries, US Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, said:
 
 China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring
 them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that
 appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network
 security issues.
 
 Before its climbdown, the Chinese government had justified the move
 to install the Green Dam censorship software as a way of protecting
 Chinese internet users from ‘harmful content’ including
 pornography. But the Guardian, citing influential Chinese bloggers
 it had spoken to in recent days, said that the huge number of
 Chinese critics of the move saw it instead as ‘a misguided attempt
 to put the internet genie back in the bottle by a Communist party
 that now has to answer to about 300 million web users.’
 
 What the climbdown means:
 
 The Chinese government’s climbdown over internet censorship
 represents an important victory for Chinese civil society and
 freedom of expression. It also proves that there are limits to the
 Chinese government’s powers of repression and that the
 government’s authoritarianism can be susceptible to the determined
 resistance of communities from within Chinese society, in this case
 its 300 million internet users, or netizens. This successful
 campaign by Chinese netizens will have been noted by other areas of
 Chinese civil society that are trying to curb the Chinese
 government’s repression and to create space for meaningful
 criticism of Chinese government policies.
 
 Another sign of the increasing willingness for Chinese citizens to
 challenge the Chinese state came in the form of a report issued by
 a group of influential Beijing-based academics and lawyers which
 offered unprecedented criticism of the failure of Chinese
 government policies inside Tibet. Those failed policies, the report
 claimed, had led to the outbreak of the Spring 2008 protests inside
 Tibet.
 
 ‘A modern country, not quite in the modern world’
 
 The Chinese government’s climbdown also exposes a crucial paradox:
 China wants to become a hi-tech society with a 21st century
 economy, but its recent ham-fisted attempts to censor the internet
 and shut down certain sites such as YouTube and Google cut straight
 across the grain of an open, hi-tech economy. BBC Today programme
 presenter, Evan Davies, expressed this contradiction when
 commenting on the climbdown over Green Dam by referring to China
 as ‘a modern country, not quite in the modern world’.
 
 The Chinese leadership’s political survival depends on continuing
 to grow China’s economy and keeping enough of its citizens happy.
 To do that, it must increasingly open its economy to the global
 economy which is open and, in the internet age, based upon the free-
 flow of information. It is impossible to see how, in the long term,
 China can increasingly open its economy up while retaining its
 power to limit and censor the information available to Chinese
 society. As its ability to control information and the free-flow of
 ideas within Chinese society inevitably weakens, the days of the
 Chinese government’s monopoly of political power look increasingly
 numbered.

Background

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