Google & China – Still a problem
The New York Times Magazine has a large article covering China’s internet, Google’s relationship with China, and the odd ways in which censorship has evolved behind the Great Firewall of China. The article starts with a critical look at Google’s January 2006 launch of the self-censoring version of its search engine on google.cn.
Yet Google’s conduct in China has in recent months seemed considerably less than idealistic. In January, a few months after Lee opened the Beijing office, the company announced it would be introducing a new version of its search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China’s censorship laws, Google’s representatives explained, the company had agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government, including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. If you search for “Tibet” or “Falun Gong” most anywhere in the world on google.com, you’ll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google will have erased them completely.
Google’s decision did not go over well in the United States. In February, company executives were called into Congressional hearings and compared to Nazi collaborators. The company’s stock fell, and protesters waved placards outside the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google wasn’t the only American high-tech company to run aground in China in recent months, nor was it the worst offender. But Google’s executives were supposed to be cut from a different cloth. When the company went public two years ago, its telegenic young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, wrote in the company’s official filing for the Securities and Exchange Commission that Google is “a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good.” How could Google square that with making nice with a repressive Chinese regime and the Communist Party behind it?
It’s heartening to see the author of this article, Clive Thompson, pull no punches when talking about the response Google received after it announced its partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. One of SFT’s largest objections – common to progressive critics of Google’s actions – was Google’s massive departure from their operating principles that are generally quite positive. It was hypocrisy of the highest order and it rightly received widespread criticism.
Thompson addresses the crux of the problem of Google’s unthoughtful, anti-progressive policy of hoping the internet will be a passive tool for social change by allowing people greater access to sports scores and music videos.
In the eyes of critics, Google is lying to itself about the desires of Chinese Internet users and collaborating with the Communist Party merely to secure a profitable market. To take Lee at his word is to take a leap of faith: that the Internet, simply through its own inherent properties, will slowly chip away at the government’s ability to control speech, seeding a cultural change that strongly favors democracy. In this view, there will be no “great man” revolution in China, no Lech Walesa rallying his oppressed countrymen. Instead, the freedom fighters will be a half-billion mostly apolitical young Chinese, blogging and chatting about their dates, their favorite bands, video games — an entire generation that is growing up with public speech as a regular habit.
I’m optimistic that the more access people inside China and Tibet have, the more questions they will ask about the repressive policies of the PRC. This includes access to websites on pop culture, convenience, leisure, and other mundane pages that might make life just a little bit easier. Using the internet as tool to add to ones awareness of and connectivity with the rest of the world will increasingly reveal the commonalities or points of difference for Chinese users to the Western world.
But it is a “leap of faith” to assume that these social changes will make their way into the political realm. Rather, Google and other collaborationist internet companies are doing a disservice to internet users inside China and Tibet by preventing them any access to the political and human rights sites that they long for. Google’s censorship of sites on Tibet, human rights abuses, Tiananmen Square, the Falun Gong, and democracy is no less than the paternalistic blocking of internet users from having an understanding of China’s history and the evolution of different diverse forms of repression inside Tibet and China. These companies presume that the choices made by the PRC as to how its interests can best be served are the right ones for the people of Tibet and China. It’s hard to give any credence to the rosey vision of the spread of information in China by the likes of Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Kai-Fu Lee when they’ve already decided that knowledge of politics, human rights, freedom, and democracy aren’t relevant to inducing change those areas.
Leaving aside the problems of the complicity of American internet companies in the repression of information inside of China, Thompson gives a remarkable account of how the Chinese government relates to censorship. It’s a very full telling of the dynamic between the government’s censorship policy and how people inside China have learned to live with it. I’m reprinting it in full because I think it’s critical to understanding the situation we’re up against when it comes to free access of information inside China.
One mistake Westerners frequently make about China is to assume that the government is furtive about its censorship. On the contrary, the party is quite matter of fact about it — proud, even. One American businessman who would speak only anonymously told me the story of attending an award ceremony last year held by the Internet Society of China for Internet firms, including the major Internet service providers. “I’m sitting there in the audience for this thing,” he recounted, “and they say, ‘And now it’s time to award our annual Self-Discipline Awards!’ And they gave 10 companies an award. They gave them a plaque. They shook hands. The minister was there; he took his picture with each guy. It was basically like Excellence in Self-Censorship — and everybody in the audience is, like, clapping.” Internet censorship in China, this businessman explained, is presented as a benevolent police function. In January, the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau created two cuddly little anime-style cartoon “Internet Police” mascots named “Jingjing” and “Chacha”; each cybercop has a blog and a chat window where Chinese citizens can talk to them. As a Shenzhen official candidly told The Beijing Youth Daily, “The main function of Jingjing and Chacha is to intimidate.” The article went on to explain that the characters are there “to publicly remind all Netizens to be conscious of safe and healthy use of the Internet, self-regulate their online behavior and maintain harmonious Internet order together.”
Intimidation and “self-regulation” are, in fact, critical to how the party communicates its censorship rules to private-sector Internet companies. To be permitted to offer Internet services, a private company must sign a license agreeing not to circulate content on certain subjects, including material that “damages the honor or interests of the state” or “disturbs the public order or destroys public stability” or even “infringes upon national customs and habits.” One prohibition specifically targets “evil cults or superstition,” a clear reference to Falun Gong. But the language is, for the most part, intentionally vague. It leaves wide discretion for any minor official in China’s dozens of regulatory agencies to demand that something he finds offensive be taken offline.
Government officials from the State Council Information Office convene weekly meetings with executives from the largest Internet service companies — particularly major portals that run news stories and host blogs and discussion boards — to discuss what new topics are likely to emerge that week that the party would prefer be censored. “It’s known informally as the ‘wind-blowing meeting’ — in other words, which way is the wind blowing,” the American businessman told me. The government officials provide warnings for the days ahead, he explained. “They say: ‘There’s this party conference going on this week. There are some foreign dignitaries here on this trip.’ ”
American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the government to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they must censor. They quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead, the government simply insists the firms interpret the vague regulations themselves. The companies must do a sort of political mind reading and intuit in advance what the government won’t like. Last year, a list circulated online purporting to be a blacklist of words the government gives to Chinese blogging firms, including “democracy” and “human rights.” In reality, the list had been cobbled together by a young executive at a Chinese blog company. Every time he received a request to take down a posting, he noted which phrase the government had objected to, and after a while he developed his own list simply to help his company avoid future hassles.
The penalty for noncompliance with censorship regulations can be serious. An American public-relations consultant who recently worked for a major domestic Chinese portal recalled an afternoon when Chinese police officers burst into the company’s offices, dragged the C.E.O. into a conference room and berated him for failing to block illicit content. “He was pale with fear afterward,” she said. “You have to understand, these people are terrified, just terrified. They’re seriously worried about slipping up and going to jail. They think about it every day they go into the office.”
As a result, Internet executives in China most likely censor far more material than they need to. The Chinese system relies on a classic psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive than formal censorship. By having each private company assume responsibility for its corner of the Internet, the government effectively outsources the otherwise unmanageable task of monitoring the billions of e-mail messages, news stories and chat postings that circulate every day in China. The government’s preferred method seems to be to leave the companies guessing, then to call up occasionally with angry demands that a Web page be taken down in 24 hours. “It’s the panopticon,” says James Mulvenon, a China specialist who is the head of a Washington policy group called the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. “There’s a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they’re looking at everything.”
It’s unfortunate that private companies, both inside and outside of China, have become tools of Chinese censorship machine. American companies should never be responsible to do the work of the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to censorship and repression. Unfortunately neither the government nor our internet corporations have shown themselves inclined to stand up for the values of freedom and democracy on the internet inside China.
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It seems that in a dictatorship such as China and how bad they are about their beliefs that this would have been done a long time before now. It saddens me to hear that there is a sensorship of this kind going on now. Makes it worse.
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