Wednesday 17 June 2009

Green Dam Girl


The FT reports "outcry over the national government’s attempt to ensure that every new personal computer sold in China is equipped with web filtering software. The ministry of industry and information technology notified computer makers last month that they would be required from July 1 to include Green Dam/Youth Escort – a programme developed under commission by the government – with every new PC.... Bloggers have taken a creative approach in their mockery of the censors. They have created “Green Dam Girl”, a woman drawn in the style of Japanese porn manga, wearing a police cap emblazoned with a crab, a pun on the Chinese word for “harmonious”, the government’s euphemism for a society without unrest, controversy or opposition.|

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How can it be censorship when the end users were never required to install or run the software?

"Ppreinstall" in Chinese actually means "bundle". Take this 6/12 ZDNet article citing WSJ for example:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=19688

The end users were never required to install or run Green Dam. As to what Green Dam will filter, it is configuable by the user.

How this is twisted into censorhip is beyond me.

Anonymous said...

I would like to point something out... It's not in the "Porn Manga style", it's in the normal Anime/Manga style... or more specificly, the OS-Tan style (Wiki it)