China”s Censors Tackle and Trip Over the Internet
by Michael Wines, Sharon LaFraniere & Jonathan Ansfield
The New York Times
April 7, 2010
Beijing “” Type the Chinese characters for “carrot” into Google”s search engine here in mainland China, and you will be rewarded not with a list of Internet links, but a blank screen.
Don”t blame Google, however. The fault lies with China”s censors “” who are increasingly a model for countries around the world that want to control an unrestricted Internet.
Since late March, when Google moved its search operations out of mainland China to Hong Kong, each response to a Chinese citizen”s search request has been met at the border by government computers, programmed to censor any forbidden information Google might turn up.
“Carrot” “” in Mandarin, huluobo “” may seem innocuous enough. But it contains the same Chinese character as the surname of President Hu Jintao. And the computers, long programmed to intercept Chinese-language searches on the nation”s leaders, substitute an error message for the search result before it can sneak onto a mainland computer.
This is China”s censorship machine, part George Orwell, part Rube Goldberg: an information sieve of staggering breadth and fineness, yet full of holes; run by banks of advanced computers, but also by thousands of Communist Party drudges; highly sophisticated in some ways, remarkably crude in others. Continue reading “Harnessing a Mythical Creature — China & The Internet”