On his New Yorker blog, Evan Osnos parses out ten myths about China that were in circulation this year, including:
Chinese Web users have no impact on the government. Fact: In June, China unveiled plans to require all new personal computers to come with filtering software “Green Dam Youth Escort,” but an outcry from Chinese Web users and foreign technology companies forced the government to rethink. It would have been too embarrassing to abandon it completely, but the government postponed indefinitely the mandatory pre-installation of the software on new computers. Some Asian brands, including Acer and Lenovo, agreed to put it in package anyway. Eventually the government announced that schools, Internet cafés and other public-use computers would still be required to run the software.
