Is China losing Grip On Information Censorship?

Now that China's controversial Green Dam has been damned - at least for now, following a furious public backlash, could it be a harbinger of changing times in China? Maybe! For, although the Chinese Government has said it has delayed the implementation of the compulsory implantation of this Government-controlled web-content filtering software in all computers to be sold in China - and have not quite scraped the mandate yet, it is still another instance of the fact that China is increasingly losing control over the spread of information.

Bowing to China's 300 million booming netizens who, along with foreign PC makers like as Dell, Sony and HP- refused to accept this measure lying down, China just pushed back Green Dam's deadline indefinitely. This is not the first instance of China's weakening grip though. Just about a month back China's Communist Party failed to handle the clampdown on the spread on information of the rioting in Xinjiang over the Internet. And ineffective too was the Government's clamp down on the social networking sites ahead of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen in June this year. Since 2004, the Government has also given in to many smaller citizen-initiated movements conducted over the Internet.

Experts say that even as popularity of the net in China makes China's Communist Party wary, it has also realized that censorship is proving increasingly counter-productive. Not only has dealing with affluent and information-based society become complex for the Party, the power of ICT may have become stronger than the world's largest authoritarian regime.

Photo: Green Dam in action: Flickr UK images blocked even if you are logged in... (Tomek Augustyn/ CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)