Concerned that the country is growing overly dependent on the Windows operating system, the Chinese government is backing Linux…‘We don’t want one company to monopolize the software market,’ said Chen Chong, a deputy minister of information industries who oversees the computer industry in China. ‘With Linux we can control the security,’ he explained, ‘so we can control our own destiny.‘Parts of the government have apparently been warning of the security risk posed by the country’s reliance on Microsoft. ‘Without information security, there is no national security in politics, economics and military affairs,’ declared an editorial in People’s Liberation Army Daily earlier this year.Many point to the discovery last year of a feature in Windows called NSAKey - NSA as in National Security Agency, the United States government agency that gathers electronic signal intelligence worldwide - as the source of the paranoia. Microsoft claimed the key was innocuous, but Liu Bo, a former Microsoft executive who is now chief executive of a government-backed company to encourage a homegrown software industry, disagrees. ‘No one can guarantee that Windows does not have back doors,’ he said. Some go so far as to say that the secret holes in Microsoft’s OS could allow the United States access to Chinese networks or even enable it to shut those networks down in times of war.Linux’s ethos - inspired by Richard Stallman’s ‘copyleft’ license,  seems to appeal to China’s Marxist leaders, and the fact that the Linux code is not privately held means that any security the country wants to build into its computer systems will not have undetectable vulnerabilities. So far several companies - including Red Flag, which is backed by President Jiang’s son, Jiang Mianhang, and TurboLinux, based in San Francisco -  have introduced Chinese-language versions of the Linux operating system in China. But Linux enthusiasts profess ambivalence about the government’s interest, warning that the Reds may not play by the rules for collaborating and sharing, and may adapt Linux to create a proprietary system instead.