China's Google Crackdown

When Google set up shop in China, it drew the wrath of critics far and wide for collaborating with the government's censorship policies; the move has done more than anything to undermine its "Don't Be Evil" image. But seeing as how some 250 million Chinese use the Internet, Google just couldn't resist such a market. Now it seems China's still not satisfied with Google's efforts to restrict Internet content and is moving to crack down on the company.

This morning, Bloomberg reports, the unpleasantly named Ministry of Public Security announced that the government would begin an aggressive new effort to root out "pornography" from the Internet and specifically denounced Google for offering links to "a huge quantity of pornographic sites." The Associated Press added that Chinese officials will severely punish any search engine that doesn't cooperate in their campaign to "purify the Internet's cultural environment." A Google spokeswoman replied that Google doesn't produce any porn but merely searches the Web on behalf of its users. As if China doesn't know that already.

But that's the cost of doing business with a cabal of apparatchiks terrified of their own people. As the Financial Times reports, China has racheted the censorship back up after loosening rules to make kissy-face with the rest of the world during last summer's Olympics. The government is deploying new state-of-the-art search and text-mining technology to detect and purge subversive Web forums earlier than ever; currently, Chinese officials are focusing on intellectuals associated with Charter 08, a call for democracy and human rights. The Chinese take censorship so seriously that the stress is actually killing their thought cops early. According to the FT, the rate of heart attacks among those working in the news and propaganda departments is skyrocketing.