Foreign Policy Blogs

Google vs. China

Google vs. China

Flowers left at a Google office in China following the Jan. 12 announcement (Photo from CBC)

News of the disaster in Haiti drowned out most other concerns last week but the earthquake was not the only newsworthy thing that happened in the world. Earlier the same day as the earthquake, Google posted a surprising message on its official company blog that raised the possibility the search engine giant may leave the Chinese market rather than continue operations under oppressive Chinese censorship laws.

The announcement was the result of a cyber attack that occurred last December which among other things, resulted in proprietary knowledge being stolen from Google as well as the attempts to access the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Needless to say, the announcement has created shockwaves within the IT, business, and international policy communities as people ponder if one of these two giants – China or Google – will cave to the other or whether the world’s largest search engine company really will leave the world’s largest potential internet market.

This story is both about business and about freedom of speech. Which issue will trump the other will largely determine how the story concludes. As Henry Hoyle over on the China Blog has done an excellent job looking at business implications of the announcement as well as the Chinese reaction, this post will only concern the freedom of speech issues mentioned in the Google announcement.

Any discussion of the issue of free speech and the internet needs to first recognize the new playing field that the internet presents over traditional media. The rise of the internet has also given rise to an entirely new set of questions when it comes to free speech and censorship, many of which have not been fully decided in Western countries let alone in states that have a lower standard of free speech. For example, the issue of free speech and the internet is at the center of the current debate over “net neutrality” that is being hotly argued in the US and Europe as people become more dependent on the internet as the place to share ideas and content. But while net neutrality largely concerns the ability of internet and data providers to limit or prioritize content, internet search engines occupy an even more prominent role in the potential censorship of the web. Because unrestricted internet access allows someone to access information, images, and data on essentially any topic imaginable, traditional speech limitations frequently run up against this infinite source of information. And as people often find this content with the aid of a search engine, search engine companies like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN are central to the issue.

Many countries, including the liberal democracies of the West, rely on search engines to filter and censor results in order to comply with domestic speech laws. For example, many companies censor results in Western countries to abide by laws that prohibit child pornography, hate speech, copyright infringement or other speech limitations that are provided for by law. What makes China different from these examples is the extent of their censorship and their use of internet companies like Yahoo! to sometimes make their case against human rights activists who advocate for broader freedoms on the Mainland.

Everyone knows that to operate in China, Western companies must follow Chinese law. Unfortunately, this does include strict censorship, especially on “politically sensitive topics.” Internet companies are perhaps the most restricted under these censorship laws since the internet normally allows people to access information on basically any topic imaginable. But under Chinese censorship, sites and posts deemed inappropriate by the Chinese government are inaccessible within China. This includes topics such as Taiwan independence, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the Dalai Lama. For a long time, entire sites like Wikipedia and YouTube were banned. Often what can be accessed depends on the current events going on in China. For example when riots broke out in Urumqi last year between Uighers and ethnic Han Chinese, the government blocked keyword searches for “Urumqi” as well as applications like Twitter and Facebook that were so effective at getting out information during the Iranian election protests just a month earlier.

But China’s grip on the internet and internet companies does not stop there. Using Chinese law, it also compels internet companies to divulge personal information about users who violate laws prohibiting government criticism.  For example, Yahoo! was found by Reporters Without Borders of providing the Chinese government with information from journalist Shin Tao’s email account that led his arrest and a ten year prison sentence in 2005 for relying information his newspaper received from the government warning about the possible social destabilization that could occur with the return of key dissidents on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. A year later, Reporters Without Borders put out two more press releases accusing Yahoo! of cooperating with police in a manner that led to the arrest and eight year prison sentence of cyberdissident Li Zhi and the arrest and four year imprisonment of pro-democracy activist Jiang Lijun, both in 2003. The information that Yahoo! provided was in accordance with Chinese law as Yahoo! located the email servers used by the Chinese market inside China. Despite the clear human rights implications of this business decision and widespread condemnation of the company by human rights organizations around the world, Yahoo! defended its actions as the cost of doing business in China.

Many foreign internet companies that have entered China have had few hesitations about this cost. But for Google – the company whose supposed unofficial motto is “Do no evil” – the compromise was a hefty one. When Google first entered the Chinese market, it took great pains to explain its decision to self-censor google.cn and drew the line at censorship of web results. Unlike other companies like Yahoo! and MSN, Google was upfront to its Chinese users that the results were censored and did not move any of the infrastructure connected to email or personal information into the country, thereby shielding the data from Chinese laws. This compromise between profits and free speech protected the company from some of the fury human rights groups had for other American companies that kowtowed to Chinese business interests, but such protection was also limited to the conditions that Google had already laid down. The hack of the email accounts of human rights activists, information that Google went at lengths to protect from Chinese laws and officials, appears to be the final straw for Google. No longer is it a matter of adhering to local laws but protecting the company and its users from an undeniably malicious intent on the part of the government.

At least that is how Google presented the issue in its announcement last week. There are plenty of cynics who question this approach and believe that business considerations are still what is at the heart of the announcement. That may be true. But by framing it as a freedom of speech issue, Google has done more than champion itself as the better party in this dispute; it has also stood up firmly to the giant that so far no other corporation (and increasingly few Western governments) have been willing to even question.

In this regard, last week’s announcement may reinforce Google’s purported reputation as an ethically-minded company and raise the stakes for other corporations who justify human rights abuses abroad as the cost of doing business. The loyalty that many Chinese Google users feel towards the company is already linked to the small improvement that Google offered them in terms of free speech protections. If Google does leave the mainland, these users will of course find a different search engine to use. But the memory of the US corporation that officially stood up for their privacy and speech rights is bound to endure, especially since many of these users are already linked to the activist community within China.

Already, Chinese users have held vigils and left flowers and cards at various Google offices in China, thanking the company for its stand. One note of the so-called flower campaign read, “Google, the mountains can’t stop our contacts, and we’ll get over the wall [the “Great Firewall”] to find you!” The sentiment demonstrates the deep desire among some Chinese for greater speech rights. It also alludes to the ever changing nature of the internet, where the government always has to be one step ahead of tech savvy citizens with the capability to outmaneuver government censorship. One prime example: the news of the flower campaign was largely distributed on Twitter, even though the application has been blocked by the government since last June.

This is the real reason why this story is not over yet, regardless of what Google decides to do next. A popular quote from Harry Millner says, “All progress occurs because people dare to be different.” In the Google vs. China debate of the last week, it is clear that Google is daring to be different. Many of its users are daring as well. Together doing so may in time help bring down the wall of censorship that rules China today.

 

Author

Kimberly J. Curtis

Kimberly Curtis has a Master's degree in International Affairs and a Juris Doctor from American University in Washington, DC. She is a co-founder of The Women's Empowerment Institute of Cameroon and has worked for human rights organizations in Rwanda and the United States. You can follow her on Twitter at @curtiskj

Areas of Focus: Transitional justice; Women's rights; Africa