China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software

For quite a while, I subscribed to the theory that China’s capitalist development would require the diffusion of modern information technology, and the diffusion of modern information technology would necessarily tend to undermine the Communist Party’s dictatorship. But over the past few years, the dictatorship has proven itself to be much more resourceful about squaring this circle than a lot of us used to assume was possible. The key factor is that the Chinese market is so enormous that China can impose rules like this new one and know that many companies will want to play along:

China has 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. The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC’s starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.

This also highlights why political developments in China are so crucial for the entire world. If, say, Iran tried to do this it almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But companies will fall all over each other to cater to the Chinese market. Then, once the technology is in place other autocracies can try to piggyback on work that’s been done in and for China. But absent China, almost all of world output would be happening in democratic nations, and it would be easy to structure the global economy in the kind of way optimists were hoping it would work for China.