Special: Green Dam Girl

Introduction

Profile
Real name	Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护航)
Nicknames	Xiao Lü ("Little Green"), Greendam, Green Bar-tan
Birthday	June 11 (2009, the day the first fan art appeared)
Age	17 (canonically)
Job	Class hall monitor
Net worth	41.7 million yuan (her power level is also 41.7 million)
Moe points	Twin tails, discipline armband, river crab hat, toy rabbit, key, soy sauce barrel
Catchphrase	"Naughty stuff is the worst!"
Bullies	XP-tan, IE-tan
Nemesis	360-tan

Green Dam Girl is the moe personification of the internet filter "Green Dam Youth Escort". The first fan art of her appeared online on June 11, 2009, and that day became her birthday.

She was the first big wave of Chinese fan creation, known as "China's first home-grown moe girl", with countless character designs — a milestone of China's anime and comics fandom. A program meant to put a "dam" on every computer in the country was drawn by netizens into an absent-minded, easily flustered girl.

Header image: a fan illustration of Green Dam Girl (version one), via Chinese Wikipedia (originally posted on blogger Hecaitou's Yupoo album); copyright belongs to the original artist.

Her Mysterious Origins

The young lady's story begins in 2008

Jan 2008
The Ministry of Information Industry issued an urgent call for "green internet filtering software": the state would buy the rights and give it away to everyone for free.
May 2008
Two programs were chosen — Zhengzhou Jinhui's image filter and Beijing Dazheng's "Youth Escort" text filter. The state paid about 41.7 million yuan for a one-year licence, and the two merged into "Green Dam Youth Escort". That's where her 41.7-million-yuan net worth comes from.
Oct 2008
Trials began in Henan and a few other places. Back then she was still just an unknown piece of software.
May 19, 2009
The ministry announced that every PC sold in China from July 1 must come with Green Dam pre-installed. The young lady's grand debut was coming!
Jun 11, 2009
University of Michigan researchers reported two serious vulnerabilities that let any web page take over the computer — and on the very same day, the first Green Dam Girl fan art was born.
Jun 2009
Netizens said "no" together: forums and blogs filled up with ridicule and parodies, petitions against the mandatory pre-install circulated online, a lawyer asked the ministry to hold a public hearing, arguing the rule had no legal basis, and some called on everyone to stay offline on July 1 in protest. Green Dam Girl herself was netizens' way of saying "no" — by turning the filter into a moe girl.
Jun 30, 2009
Amid the outcry, one day before her debut, the ministry postponed the pre-install with no new date. Her debut was delayed indefinitely.
Aug 2009
Home PCs no longer had to come with it; only schools and internet cafés did. By 2010 the developers said they had received no further payments and their Beijing support team was disbanded — in Moegirl's lore, the young lady fell on hard times and ended up wandering the streets.

Looks & Personality

Character Design

Green Dam Girl has no official design — every artist draws her differently — but almost every version has these:

Twin tailsGreen (deep green) hair in twin tails.

River crab hatA river crab on her hat — "river crab" (héxiè) sounds like "harmony" (héxié).

Discipline armbandShe's the class's strict hall monitor.

Toy rabbitThe mascot that came with the Green Dam software.

A keyShe's so forgetful she wears her key around her neck.

Soy sauce barrelThe "sealed soy sauce barrel" from the earliest design.

The Main Versions

Version 1: River crab hatBased on Nitori Kawashiro from Touhou Project, with the river crab hat, a sealed soy sauce barrel and the discipline armband. The earliest and best-known design.
Version 2: The young ladyLed by artist Longqi Yi's design: white boots, a short green skirt and a shield hairpin, in young-lady and loli variants — the most widely accepted look.
Version 3: ZetaSlasherWorks elements of the Green Dam interface into her design; it won a fan poll on the Green Dam Girl Baidu forum.
And moreThe comics-club version, the Ne Baozi version, and too many others to count.

To see fan art of each version, visit the Green Dam Girl entry on the Moegirl wiki (in Chinese).

Moe Traits

AirheadAlways mixes up her keywords and blocks the wrong things; if IE-tan changes jackets she doesn't recognise her.

TsundereShe says "naughty stuff is the worst!", yet adult websites once appeared among the links on Green Dam's official site…

Rich young ladyWorth 40 million, with 41.7 million yuan of pocket money a year.

Colour-blindBlocks anything with lots of yellow or skin tones — reportedly even Garfield.

All bark, no biteArrives full of bluster, then falls apart the moment anyone actually uses her.

Picks on the weakOnly works properly on Windows XP, so she bullies XP-tan and IE-tan but can't do a thing to Vista-tan or Firefox-tan.

Bullied by 360-tanSoon after Green Dam came out, 360 Safe Guard added a special "uninstall Green Dam" button.

Weaknesses

Only works on Windows XP — Vista, Mac or Linux: reflected!
Only works in IE — Firefox, Opera, Safari: reflected ×2!
Not very bright: even satellite maps with black backgrounds and yellow roads get blocked.
Rumour has it the admin username and password were stored in a plain .txt file.

Fan Works (a few)

Songs, music videos, comics, novels, games… people made more for her than anyone can list:

和谐你全家绿坝娘满开小绿拳扑杀天使小绿绿新世纪和谐天使无可奈何绿坝娘格林达姆加油歌七彩恋心绿bar娘东方绿坝异空录傲娇笨蛋绿⑧子月神之匙绿坝娘伪春菜绿坝娘大冒险360杀毒-绿坝娘皮肤翠梦Project

What Others Said

According to Moegirl, the news site Jinyang Wang said Green Dam Girl appeared because Chinese netizens wanted to "express their love for Green Dam through comics" — truly, anything can be prettified.

Japanese anime communities such as 2ch saw her as the start of China's moe-personification craze. Truly, anything can be made moe.

Spotted in Real Life

Same expo: the young lady seems to be in a good mood todayRyumew（摄影）, Minnie PANG & SoHome Jacaranda（cosplay） · CC BY-SA 3.0

Tribute

Thank You, Netizens of That Summer

The state spent 41.7 million yuan trying to put a "dam" on every computer; netizens took one evening to turn it into a forgetful, blushing hall monitor.

The people who dug through the code for bugs, who drew fan art, who wrote songs and made videos, who voted "no" in the polls, who wrote stubborn blog posts… they used the least serious methods to protect the most serious thing: an internet where you can speak freely and joke freely.

A salute to everyone online that summer. (Green Dam Girl: Hmph, it's not like I'm touched or anything!)

Sources

绿坝娘Moegirl wiki (Chinese) · 持续更新
明叔亮：年使用费4170万 “绿坝”社会成本高昂Caijing via Aisixiang (Chinese) · 2009-06-10
Civil Society Reaction to the “Green Dam” Internet Filter SoftwareNautilus Institute (Jia Xijin) · 2009-08-27
Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware SystemUniversity of Michigan (Wolchok, Yao, Halderman) · 2009-06-11
律师申请财政部公开绿坝采购信息Aisixiang (Chinese) · 2009-06-17
China rights lawyer challenges Internet filtering policyJURIST · 2009-06-11
Internet boycott calls to mark China filter debutOpenNet Initiative (Reuters) · 2009-06-23
China Delays Internet Filtering PlanNPR · 2009-06-30
“Green Dam” as a Case of Online Activism in ChinaColumbia University Press Blog (Guobin Yang) · 2009-07-01
Green Dam Enforcement Watered DownOpenNet Initiative · 2009-10-09
Green Dam's operations status uncertainInterfax · 2010-07
Green Dam Girl (绿坝娘)Know Your Meme · 2009-10

The character lore on this page is summarised from the Moegirl wiki's Green Dam Girl entry; the history follows the 2009–2010 reports listed. Green Dam Girl was created collectively by many netizens and belongs to no one person; the header fan art belongs to its original artist and is shown here for commentary only. Some sources are in Chinese.

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