The software called ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ would be connected to a regularly updated database of banned sites and will block the users’ access to the listed addresses.
Under the directives from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of July 1, all computer-manufacturers will be asked to install the software from a company that has ties with the country's military.
Aiming at a clean Internet environment
The move is aimed at "constructing a green, healthy, and harmonious Internet environment, and preventing harmful information on the Internet from influencing and poisoning young people", read a May 19 Chinese government notice, cited by the Wall Street Journal.
"This is very good news for users, so they should not uninstall it. It will automatically filter pornographic images and antirevolutionary content. It will not take up much space on the hard drive. It is very stable and we have conducted many tests already," says Ms. Zhou of the Jinhui Computer System Engineering Company in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan.
Young minds gripped by pornography
According to Zhang Chenmin, general manager of the company, surveys across the nation have suggested that teenagers are increasingly getting hooked to pornography on the internet and they often exchange the links to porn-sites. By making the software mandatory on all computers, the government is seeking to restrain the youth from indulging in explicit pornography.
Also, the software can be used by parents to block any other sites that they want their children to keep away from. Parents can add their own lists of websites to the database of blacklisted sites, Zhang said.
"If a father doesn't want his son to be exposed to content related to basketball or drugs, he can block all Web sites related to those things," Chenmin said, adding that, conversely, users also could release Web sites that are present in the database.
Deal for the software
Chenmin revealed that last May his company had signed a 21 million yuan ($3 million) contract with the Chinese government to develop the software and dispense it to personal computer-makers, for free, in one year.
Beijing Dazheng Language Technology Co. Ltd., which jointly developed the software, refused to comment.
With more than 250 million Chinese citizens online, the Asian country has the world's largest population of Internet users. Internet pornography, however, is banned here and a nationwide crackdown was launched earlier this year, to ban the bold sites.
More than 1,900 Web sites have been shut since the launch of the campaign and popular search engines like Google and Baidu (China's most popular search engine) were criticized for providing links to suspected blacklisted sites.
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