“Google, China, and Genocide”

Famed human rights activist and hacker Oxblood Ruffin has written a feature article titled “Google, China, and Genocide” for Cult of the Dead Cow’s monthly online publication. In the piece Ruffin takes a hard nosed approach to shaming China’s physical and cultural genocide of Tibet and Google’s complicity in it by partnering with the Chinese government.

Cultural genocide is subtler than physical genocide — its tools are less obvious. So now China can extend its dilution of Tibetan culture into cyberspace with expert assistance. Google has agreed to filter out every aspect of Tibetan life that the Chinese government finds offensive, leaving only propaganda, misrepresentations, and outright lies about Tibet and Tibetans. It’s amazing. The Tibetan people spent thousands of years developing their history and culture, and Google managed to make it disappear in little more than a year with only a few algorithms.
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Google has made a horrible mistake in judgment. It has sold out the Tibetan people, censored the Internet, made a mockery of free speech, and placed Western security interests at risk. Google can continue its maudlin tap dance of regret, or it can stand up and do the right thing. The right thing would be for Google.cn to suspend operations. Google doesn’t need any more meetings with human rights groups and ethical investors, and it needn’t continue pretending that its neutered existence in China is making a difference to anyone other than its own shareholders. Any short-term loss to the company’s profits would be more than made up for in an internationally reinvigorated Google brand. And it could always re-enter the Chinese market if the government agreed to meet Google at least half way.

It would only take one prestigious IT company to put the government of China on notice and create a chain reaction that could, in time, benefit Tibetans and Chinese alike. Google has a unique opportunity to match its technical innovations with ethical leadership. It can respectfully assert its values to the government of China and curtail some of its operations. In the long term everyone will be better off, especially China. One would like to believe that Leon Sullivan would have supported this approach. He knew the difference between good and evil, and he knew what to do about it.

Ruffin’s article is an important reminder that it is not simply the launch of an arrangement that enables the Chinese government’s cultural genocide of the Tibetan people that is offensive to human rights and human dignity. Rather it is the continuation of the practice that allows the genocide to be perpetrated that truly offends all standards of moral behavior by corporate entities. Google needs to do as Ruffin suggests and simply pull out of China of its own accord; many Tibetans have called for that for over the last fifteen months and this page has repeatedly asked the same. Google sits in a position where it has the power to dramatically shape the course of freedom inside China. It could be a real leader in the IT community and shutter its doors in China in order to end its complicity with the cultural genocide of Tibet and the repression of all people inside China.

Google’s corporate motto continues to be “Don’t be evil.” Over a year after initiating their partnership in cultural genocide; unlike Leon Sullivan, Google does not yet appear to know the difference between good and evil, let alone what to do about it.

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