Hot trending tweets about China: “How to circumvent China’s Firewall,” “why Google exited China” and a Chinese vaccine scandal.
Of course if you were in China, you would only recently be able to read these because nine months ago China made a serious decision. It banned Twitter and all other microblogging services, effectively destroying the ability to disseminate information faster than the government could approve it, once again placing the communist government in control of what people were allowed to talk about on the Internet. This week, in another defiant move in a long string of defiant moves, Google gave China the finger and started returning relevant microblog results (including Twitter) along with searches. This follows Google’s swift exodus from China to Hong Kong (which is not subject to the same 60 Internet censorship laws as the rest of China) by rerouting all traffic from google.cn to google.com.hk. The move was dicey, but the first week has proved its feasibility — and drawn the anger of the dragon.
If China doesn’t want to play nice, why should anyone else? This marks the second time that an Internet technology company has stood up to China’s oppressive Internet demands, which are the pinnacle of modern-day censorship. But Google also knows how to play it safe: It has kept its engineering and sales offices in mainland China. Google’s hope is to come to some reasonable conclusion with China by illustrating its willingness to do business as well as its ability to circumvent China’s laws, which sends a message similar to one file sharers sent to the RIAA a decade ago: “You’re either with us or we’ll do whatever the hell we want.” With one foot in the door and one finger up in the air, I can’t wait to see what happens next: It’s a soap opera for nerds.
The true story here is that while all this drama plays out, human rights are the victim. Google is essentially fighting for the same human rights that are enjoyed by many countries around the world through its want to return uncensored search results, not ones that only include government-approved terms and government-approved Web sites.
One cannot engender a thoughtful and inquisitive society with a hope for enlightenment without the free access to information. Perhaps there is something to be said for blocking certain types of information, for instance child pornography or snuff film sites. But here in the good ol’ U.S., I can type “Mein Kampf” into a browser and read it at my leisure. Not that I have or would, mind you. Book long. Reading hard.
Comparatively in the last nine months in China, you couldn’t even read tweets as a source of news to see what people were talking about in your country. In that system, there is no fail-safe against propaganda; you can’t see what the end-users are saying and compare it to what the government is saying like you can out here in the free Internet. It’s information bullying.
According to Guardian.co.uk, China’s “Internet police” are estimated to be at around 30,000 and have blocked around 19,000 Web sites. They are the result of anti-Japanese, anti-pollution and anti-government protests that were organized on the Internet — with the express purpose of neutralizing Internet opinions. According to Amnesty International, China has the largest number of imprisoned journalists and ‘cyber-dissidents’ in the world. According to Harvard’s Cyber Law Web site, a sampling of sites that have been censored that most of us would consider absolutely benign are: ABC, Voice of America, various iterations of Yahoo!, The Washington Post, NASA’s science division, and Red Lobster restaurants. According to Tech Crunch, Facebook and Twitter were blocked last year after riots because they may become harbors of political dissent. To top it off, according to Telegraph.co.uk, China mysteriously went down for nationwide Internet maintenance on the days around the 20-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Honestly, if your government is in such sorry shape that you have to essentially destroy the Internet to stop people from organizing against you, perhaps the Internet isn’t the real problem here.
Google should be lauded for standing up for freedom while still making shrewd business decisions; too few companies have the courage to do that. But if it comes down to it, it should choose freedom over Chinese business. As responsible Americans who have stood up to tyranny and social abuses for the last 235 years, we do a great disservice by doing business, and therefore, by proxy, enabling those who spread tyranny. Microblogging and Internet searches are their own freedom, and if China wants to block itself off from the Internet and live in a little bubble, let it. More Internet for the rest of us, I say.
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