News headlines are lighting up like Christmas trees, as the news of China’s Green Dam Youth Escort Project are filling PC manufacturers in the overseas trade markets with dread. In a recent report first issued by the Wall Street Journal, details of a new initiative fired off by the CPC (Communist Party of China) has put a full-scale mandate in effect that requires all PC manufacturers to ship every one of those brand-new PC’s slated for export into China with mysterious software from Henan-based Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co. — pre-installed on the hard drive — by July 01 this year.

Yes, that’s the beginning of next month. No, there wasn’t much advance notice.

It’s a rather tall order, considering that PC makers supplied more than 40 million new PC’s to China last year (New York Times) and it’s anticipated that the world’s largest online community (over 300 million to date) are going to keep buying new computers. It begs the question: who will supply these new PC’s to the Chinese market? I’m willing to bet that PC makers like the bruised-and-battered DELL (Ouch. Wasn’t it a 34% reduction in PC sales last month?) would like to know the answer, immediately.

This spells big trouble for the folks who have to go back into the warehouses to open up sealed boxes and install the new software, which is already being decried as “unstable, ineffective, and problematic…” even before Beijing’s unrealistic rollout date. According to the Beijing News, the program is “less than stellar” in its ability to filter content.

Immediate backlash notwithstanding, pundits are already stepping up to the plate, as they attempt to defend the decision by the central government. In a related statement, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang made it clear:

“The purpose of this is to effectively manage harmful material for the public

and prevent it from being spread.”

Screen capture of Green Dam warning page.

While all of this may sound deviously Orwellian in nature, it should come as no surprise to the crafty wholesale / retail virtuosos (that would be YOU!) that a severe, near-crippling bottleneck in the system introduces an opportunity to pick up some product that does no good to anyone, as it sits in containers and warehouses gathering dust… and reaching the end of its technology cycle, before resulting in a profit for the manufacturers. In other words, there may be some leveraging power for those who want to help move the goods, and this could be a boom year in the domestic wholesale PC business, despite all the hand-wringing from the likes of political activists, to the PC industry giants that have been stopped in their tracks by this sudden boondoggle in the path of Q3 sales for the year.

Checking out some Top10 results like these can reveal a soon-to-be exploding market in Personal Computer liquidation. Get in there while you have the chance, and don’t be surprised as the market swings wildly from one end of the pendulum to the other.

Whether this thing really becomes a problem in the long-run is unclear at this point, but until the politicos can resolve things from the highest diplomatic levels, PC makers the world over might be heard saying: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a Dam… but what will you give me for these computers?”