Li Yizhong, the head of China’s Ministry for Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), admits the ministry got it wrong on the Green Dam web filtering scheme.
In a rare concession from a senior Chinese official, Li said Thursday that the plan to install the software on every PC in China was “not thoughtful enough.”
“We will listen to the public's views before issuing a new directive on Green Dam,” he said, but declined to put a timetable on it.
The belated apology effectively scuppers the program, although Li said Green Dam would be installed on school and internet café computers.
He said the government had intended the software to be sold as a CD-ROM with PCs, but was not intended to be pre-installed.
“The choice of words in the directive was not clear enough, which led to people's misunderstanding of why the Green Dam software was ordered to be available on all computers,” he said.
The filtering software was to be shipped from July 1, but the plan was called off at the last minute after an outcry from PC-makers and local internet users.
Foreign PC firms said they had not been given enough time to prepare, and warned that they could be liable for litigation because of a patent dispute between a US company and the Chinese firm behind the software.
Testing of Green Dam by independent foreign groups found that as well as blocking pornographic content it registered false positives and censored political key words.