China is at once enticing as a business landscape, scary as an emerging threat to America’s hegemony and easy punching bag for its closed, police-state society. “Easy” is an important word there because, I think, the treatment of the China’s battle with Google over internet censorship has been the jumping off point for a lot of bloviating and easy answers but no real nuanced exploration of what that system of censorship really amounts to.
I am of the opinion that up until the point where Google directly butted heads with the PRC in early 2010, they had played their presence in the country perfectly. Winning a short term, Pyrrhic, and most importantly, symbolic victory by rubbing China’s nose in their own censorship (something everyone is already aware of, already) is not worth the long-term effects of pulling out altogether, giving China a tacit nod to continue to become ever more insular.
It’s difficult to argue for Google not to take a constant and open stand against China’s censorship because so much more than just the interests of the Chinese government and Google are at stake:
More than a battle over territory or market share, it is a conflict over ideology, one that pits a free and open Internet that empowers individuals at the expense of existing power structures against an Internet micromanaged by those powers. "What we're talking about here is a defense of the essence of the Internet," says Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York (Moyer)If one wants to accuse Mr. Moyer of hyperbole, many other examples of the same sentiment litter the internet following Google’s showdown with the Chinese government. “Google is defending the Internet itself against censorship, repression and attack. Finally, someone is standing up to China. When will more companies and governments follow?" (Neuarth).
Indeed, the reaction to Google’s openly confrontational showdown with the PRC early last year was hailed with almost universal acclaim from technologists and foreign policy experts alike. “Many U.S companies that make big bucks doing business in China have put up with the censorship and tight controls imposed by a succession of communist dictators. "That makes Google all the more gutsy for spitting in China's eye this week” (Neuarth).
Later on, experts on Google itself as a country heaped their praise on as well: “The move, if followed through, would be a highly unusual rebuke of China by one of the largest and most admired technology companies, which had for years coveted China‘s 300 million Web users... I think it‘s both the right move and a brilliant one,’ said Jonathan Zittrain, a legal scholar at Harvard‘s Berkman Center for Internet and Society” (Jacobs, Helft).
Most importantly of all, the experts pointed out, Google has the means to stand toe-to-toe with the PRC:
[A]ny large-scale circumvention effort requires a huge number of addresses to cycle through, along with an enormous amount of bandwidth to support all the tunneling. ‘If we could magically convince all Chinese people to use [these services],’ [Hal Roberts of the Berkman Center]s says, ‘then someone would have to pay for the entire outgoing bandwidth of China.’ That might strain Google's resources, but not by much. (Moyer)Open internet advocates now see a white knight in Google where before they saw just another greedy company looking to get as big a foothold as possible in the world’s largest and most profitable emerging market. For Google to finally reverse their decision represented a new hope for American open-information advocates: “More than any other organization, Google has both the means and the incentive to ensure that the Internet remains open. It is also one of the few organizations with a broad enough online presence to define the standard operating rules of the Internet" (Moyer quoting Rebecca MacKinnon)
Given that A) Google and the Chinese government can’t and won’t see eye-to-eye on the issue of how and when to openly promulgate information and that B) the Chinese government has a long history of taking a hard line against companies and organizations that seek to disseminate that same information, many experts see only one solution: Google should openly challenge the PRC and when that government, in all likelihood balks, then Google should refuse to do business in China. I, however, see this as a view the lacks nuance. Let’s look a little deeper into the situation:
“Google executives declined to discuss in detail their reasons for overturning their China strategy. But despite a costly investment, the company has a much smaller share of the search market here than it does in other major markets, commanding only about one in three searches by Chinese. The leader in searches, Baidu, is a Chinese-run company that enjoys a close relationship with the government” (Jacobs, Helft).In another section, Jacobs states: “Google said it would otherwise [should the PRC not allow open access to information] cease to run google.cn and would consider shutting its offices in China, where it employs some 700 people, many of them highly compensated software engineers, and has an estimated $300 million in annual revenue” (Jacobs). I’m not trying to denigrate Google’s standing in China, $300 million annual revenue is absolutely not nothing, but it’s also not enough to hurt the PRC in any substantive way. Google is not even the number one search engine in the People’s Republic. I think for Google to simply pack up their ball and go home would be an act of impetuousness – one that might score some short-term brownie points with advocates at home but one likely to make little difference where it counts: in China.
Let’s take, by way of comparison, an American issue that has similar overtones: In 2003, the French, German and Russian government all condemned the U.S. for its intention to invade Iraq. Lacking hard, shared evidence, these governments saw U.S. action on this front as hasty. At the time, only a very small majority of Americans supported an invasion and the vast majority of people abroad were opposed to the same. Given all that, the French, German and Russia opposition was treated with contempt, even open hostility.
A large part of America’s political character is pride – as such, other countries telling us what to do, even if it is not an unpopular sentiment, only makes the other side ever more recalcitrant. Germany, France and Russia's statement was treated suspicion at best and if they moved the needle of American popular opinion at all, they moved it in the wrong direction.
China, with its long history of a similar vein self-superiority by way of Sinocentrism (indeed, China has historically referred to itself as the Middle Kingdom) has and likely will continue to respond in the same way to the intervention of foreign interlopers.
To return the original point: if Google; an American company, seeks to change China from the outside by way of direct confrontation it is likely only to calcify the PRC’s commitment to choking off open access to information. Open confrontation with Chinese government will satisfy critics at home but ultimately do very little by way of substantive change for the Chinese citizenry.
Observe what Google actually did, and you’ll see that they’ve deftly navigated a third way where they’ve made substantive inroads to opening up information to the Chinese without flying too much in the fact of the government:
Google, in turn, agreed to no longer provide "lawbreaking content." In effect, Google agreed to automatically stop rerouting users of Google.cn, the Chinese version of Google, to its site in Hong Kong, which was not subject to China's online censorship. Search requests now made from Google.cn take an extra click in order to visit the Hong Kong site (Red Herring Staff)Note the bold part. Google acquiesced to China's demand to continue censoring search results? It only takes one click more than it did previously to reach a site on google.cn to basically have free and open access to information via Google’s search engine. How much computer savvy is really needed to push one extra button? Further:
The challenge for the authorities is that there is just too much to police by moderators, and automatic filters don‘t work terribly well. Chinese routinely use well-known code phrases for terms that will be censored (June 4 might become June 2+2, or May 35). Likewise, Chinese can usually get around the ―great firewall of China‖ by using widely available software, like Freegate, or by tunneling through a virtual private network (Kristof)By Kristof’s estimates China now has: “450 million Internet users, far more than any other country, and perhaps 100 million bloggers.” Google is throwing a lifeline to these people, who from the inside of the PRC can move the needle knowing full well that an attack on the Chinese government’s policies from an American outsider will do much less good for everyone than grassroots action from within.
In my opinion, Google played it exactly right: giving the impression of acquiescing to the PRC while really working to undermine them where it counts and spread information through backchannels that really aren’t that difficult to find. Sure, from a purely idealistic standpoint one would prefer that Google just stand up to the bully and good would triumph over evil but Google makes their decisions in this world, not a utopian vacuum. As such, I think it’s easy to criticize any action on the part of Google to kowtow to Chinese pressure but I believe if you look just a little bit closer, the truth is they really haven't. In the end, I think Google equated itself nicely against its motto. It wasn’t evil.
Jacobs, Andrew; Helft, Miguel. “Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China.” New York Times. 1/13/2010
Kristoff, Nicholas D,. “Banned in Beijing!” New York Times. 1/22/2011
Kynge, James. “China and the west: full circle.” Financial Times. 1/15/2010
Moyer, Michael. “Internet Ideology War.” Scientific American. 00368733, Apr2010. Vol. 302, Issue 4.
Neuarth, Al. “Google is gutsy to spit in China’s eye.” USA Today. 03/26/2010
Red Herring Staff. “Google vs China.” Red Herring. 1080076X, 7/15/2010.
Zakaria, Fareed. The Post-American World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2008.
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