It has such a stupid name, it doesn't actually sound like software: it sounds like a deliberate attempt to mock a totalitarian government that tries to use software; like someone's brought George Orwell back from the dead (just one more job, mate …); nevertheless, the Chinese government is pretty serious about its Green Dam Youth Escort package, through which it aims to control individual access to porn sites on the internet. A press release on Monday detailed three Chinese computer companies who had vouched to pre-install the software (no foreign ones as yet), and said it had already been installed in 52.7m units.
The immediate worry, reported by this newspaper's correspondent in Beijing, Jonathan Watts, is that it will be used to restrict access to dissident sites, not just pornographic ones. He elaborated: "What they have at the moment is a fairly crappy, easy to uninstall piece of software. But you have to remember that this is stage one, once you enable the authorities to censor at machine level, the software will get better and better. So my feeling is that this is an attempt to shore up the great firewall which doesn't work a lot of the time." Chinese bloggers are currently concentrating on that crappy aspect: it is a terrible programme, apparently, with a hair-trigger that blocks access on the basis of innocuous phrases like "touch-ball", unsophisticated enough to block not just pornography but all news articles that mention pornography.
There are also sinister rumours surrounding the collection of personal information on people who try to access banned sites: the worry being, again, that this has nothing to do with pornography, this is about putting in place the technology to control all computers, and all users, to the point where the would-be dissident has no safe way to use the internet at all.
And yet it's possible that the government is on the level, that pornography is the target. The immediate impulse with Chinese legislation of this sort is always to look to political freedoms being encroached upon. I would suggest three reasons for this: first, if we were just to take at face value the impulse to control access to internet pornography, it wouldn't look so radically different to that proposed by the Australian Labour party last year. Sure, China moves faster and is somewhat less receptive to criticism, but the methods are the same, and so indeed is the rhetoric – stress the dangers to children, ask yourselves, citizens, whether you wouldn't do anything to protect the innocent, and if not, why not, you pervert? It seems important to a sense of western democratic identity to distance itself from China, particularly in situations that don't look very different.
Secondly, because one's image of China is of a repressive country, we don't think of it as a place with an active sex industry. In fact illegal prostitution and semi-legal concubinage is everywhere; when there was a clampdown on prostitution in 2000, economists saw a 1% fall in GDP. The country is now seeing, after all, the first generation to reach adulthood since the one-child policy was introduced in 1979, and the gender disparity is marked: estimates give 32 million excess men. As long ago as 2004, government minister Li Weixiong directly cited the gender imbalance for the febrile sexual atmosphere, predicting worse to come in terms of prostitution and people trafficking, as well as social unrest, civil war, even, and insisting "this is by no means sensational".
Researchers are wary, however, of blaming the sex industry on gender ratios. Dr Thérèse Hesketh, a senior lecturer in International Health at UCL, observes that: "The areas where there are most sex workers are not the areas where there are the highest gender ratios. Largely, poverty is one of the greatest drivers of the sex industry." Hesketh is also suspicious of Li's predictions of orgiastic apocalypse: based on research she's conducting at the moment, she has found that: "These unmarried men are quite withdrawn, introvert, shy guys. They are not the kind of guys who are going to go out and start a riot." Nevertheless, the government remains terrified of sex in terms of its potential as a spur for unrest.
And here, thirdly, is the cognitive gap that makes it so hard to take the Green Dam Youth Escort programme at face value: the Chinese think they can prevent social unrest by controlling pornography. We think this must surely be a smokescreen for preventing explicit political content, since sexual content is itself a form of control. There is no better way on earth to castrate collectivised protest than to have everyone sitting in their bedroom, atomised and alienated, doing things they want to do in private. The Chinese government don't even need market research to see that, they only need to look at us.
In the end, precisely because there appears to be this curious institutional naivety about the impact of gender imbalance as well as the impact of pornography, indeed, about the interplay between sex and politics altogether, I find it more and more plausible that they mean what they say. This really is an attempt to control sex on the web, and has nothing to do with dissidence. Just because it's plausible, of course, doesn't mean it's not ridiculous.
Zoe Williams