When China’s authoritarian leaders are on top of their game, they can make awesome feats look breathlessly easy, lacing the coasts with bullet trains, throwing up vast airports seemingly overnight, plopping scores of power plants on the landscape like some giant farmer setting out rice shoots.
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When they are off their game, it becomes apparent that managing a billion-plus people is not easy at all, even with near-absolute power.
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Which is why, some here say, the government issued an embarrassing last-minute postponement on Tuesday of a plan to require Internet-censorship software on every computer sold here.
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Technology experts said on Wednesday that the turnabout appeared to be the product of miscalculation and poor execution by a government bureaucracy whose reach — a penchant for ratcheting up security — exceeded its grasp.
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That China’s leaders have pressed for extraordinary restrictions on free speech and political protest this year, amid a stretch of politically sensitive anniversaries, could have led the program’s backers to assume they had more support at the top echelons of the government than actually existed.
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We outsiders tend to perceive the Chinese government as a monolith, said David Wolf, a technology consultant and blogger on Chinese technology matters based in Beijing.
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But it’s precisely these kinds of policies that underscore that there are actually a whole range of groups inside the government making policies, to a certain extent, without regard to broader issues.
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Few outside the government know clearly how the plan to require censorship software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, materialized.
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The government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which sponsored the program, has described Green Dam as a software program that blocks pornographic and violent content on computers.
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Some reports suggest, however, that the developers of the software had close connections to China’s security apparatus and that the proposal to require the software enjoyed support there.
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