China’s Communist Party sure has had an embarrassing couple of weeks. Starting with its Green Dam Youth Escort public relations disaster, followed by outrage over the Party’s scapegoat attack on Google, and now, in an extremely telling event, China’s anti-corruption website crashed as users overwhelmed it.

The central government launched its “24-hour anti-corruption website and its accompany hotline number… to inform central government officials about local-level corruption,” the BBC reports.  Unsurprisingly, the number of Chinese citizens logging onto the site far exceeded the site’s capacity.

Harry Wu, Laogai survivor and LRF founder, testified for The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the United States House of Representatives regarding the state of Internet freedom in China.  His statement is below:

I want to thank Co-Chairman Wolf and Co-Chairman McGovern for inviting me to speak before the Commission today and for the Commission’s ongoing attention to the human rights situation in China.

Over the past several weeks, the Chinese government has caused quite an uproar among its 300 million or so Internet users, the most of any country in the world, after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced its decision requiring that all computers sold within the country from July 1st onward be preinstalled with the Green Dam Youth Escort (‘Green Dam’).  Developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., Green Dam is software that uses blacklists and image processing technology to filter out “harmful” words, images, and website addresses.

Not only does Green Dam censorship software contain gaping security flaws, it also (allegedly) contains stolen code from a U.S. software company.  According to the Associated Press,  “Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara said Friday that parts of its filtering software, which is designed for parents, are being used in the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software.” The company plans to pursue legal action, but is still “trying to assess” the situation.

Having been  “ridiculed for sloppy programing, possible intellectual property violations and… security holes,” Green Dam Youth Escort has turned into a public relations disaster.  An opinion piece in Forbes notes, “This move was so ham-fisted that it provoked exactly what the government doesn’t want: a raging public controversy about government censorship.”

The Chinese government is on the defensive after its mandate requiring web filtration software on all computers stirred a huge controversy.  In the party’s official paper, the Guangming Daily, a report called “the software a breakthrough in the drive for a ‘civilized Internet’”.  State television even claimed that the “filtering was endorsed by a ‘vast number’ of parents and experts.”  Who these vast number of supporters are and where they have been voicing their support is anyone’s guess.

Rather, reports about the flaws and the outright absurdity of the mandate are surfacing in great numbers.  The Wall Street Journal Blog reports that some internet users have started substituting “the words for Green Dam (绿坝, pronounced lüba in Mandarin) with homophones that translate as ‘filter bully’ (滤霸) or ‘donkey king’ (驴霸).”

On June 8, the New York Times reported that China “issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other ‘unhealthy information’ from the Internet”.

This new software called “Green Dam Youth Escort” has been developed by Jinhui, a company with close relations to China’s security ministry and military — making the prospect of abuse all the more worrisome.

The announcement of the software mandate, scheduled to be in place by July 1, has caused a great stir in China and abroad.  According to Reuters, “a Chinese lawyer has demanded a public hearing” on the “lawfulness and reasonableness” of the mandate, also noting that the plan “lacks a legal basis.”  Other community leaders are even “preparing a mass petition to mobilize opposition to the software”.