The Great Firewall of China, Revisited
Or, why aren't their blue and red provinces in Iraq and China?
Back in June, I quoted this (in part):
Chinese authorities continue to block human rights, educational, political, and news websites without providing the public notice, explanation, or opportunity for appeal. Chinese officials have publicly admitted that the government has established a national firewall to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing certain types of content. Studies conducted by Commission staff and others indicate that China's national firewall is used primarily to block political content, not obscenity or junk mail. Tests performed by the Commission staff indicate that the Chinese government continues to manipulate Internet communications....
Le blog du R1 quotes the following from the New York Times:
In April 2004, a few weeks before the 15th anniversary of Beijing's massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square, the top-ranking staff members of the Contemporary Business News in Human were called into a meeting. An editor read a message from the Communist Party's propaganda department warning that protests or media coverage of the anniversary would not be tolerated as June 4 approached. Though the message was routine reporters were warned not to take notes.
But Shi Tao, one of the journalists, did. He e-mailed them to a Chinese dissident in America, who posted them on the Web. A few months later, Mr. Shi was arrested. This April, he was given 10 years in prison, a sentence the judge called lenient, for disseminating state secrets abroad.
How did the police find Mr. Shi? His newly published verdict states that the prosecution relied on information given to the government by Mr. Shi's e-email provider, Yahoo....
Sophisticated filters block access for users in China to ideas about democracy, human rights, Taiwan, Tiananmen and other sensitive subjects. Type in "democracy" on a search engine to China and you get a limited choice of government-approved sites, or nothing at all, or a warning that the word is prohibited. If you use one of these words in an e-mail message, chat room or blog, you will be censored, and possibly arrested.
American companies like Microsoft and Cisco have all sold China security tools and firewalls that China has turned into political controls. The companies argue that it is not their fault if China mis-uses standard politically neutral technology. They are right, but many foreign Internet companies in China have gone beyond neutrality. Some, including Yahoo, signed a pledge of "self-discipline" in 2002, promising to follow China's censorship laws. Many internet portals actively, censor their Chinese Web sites.
Reporting a client to totalitarian police is still another category of bad behavior, a move that should shrivel the keyboard fingers of Yahoo users everywhere....
The company admits it linked the e-mail to Mr. Shi's telephone for the police. Its only comment has been a brief declaration that its local subsidiaries must obey local laws, regulations and customs. But according to the verdict, the Yahoo subsidiary that turned in Mr. Shi is in Hong Kong. It has no more obligation to obey China's security laws than does Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California.
Post interrupted: In response to the statement about Hong Kong, I posted the following question in Blog du R1:
Inasmuch as Hong Kong is formally part of China, what is to stop China from requiring Hong Kong-based businesses to comply with the Chinese government's wishes? And, more importantly, if China can control Western businesses in the part of China outside of Hong Kong, what is to stop them from controlling Western businesses within Hong Kong?
But no matter. The important thing is that Yahoo's action have angered some people. For example, Jim Etchison has started a Yahoo! boycott blog, BooYahoo:
Why Boycott Yahoo?
The three major Western internet providers in China (Google, MSN, and Yahoo!) have all been complicit with the Chinese government in helping censor the web searches of Chinese citizens. That alone is enough to boycott any of them. But Yahoo! has recently distinguished itself out as the most oppressive American Internet Corporation doing business in China....
The abbreviated version is as follows: An anonymous Chinese citizen sent out information about how the Chinese government intended to censor information about the 15-year anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. This person used a Yahoo! e-mail address to do it. The Chinese Secret Police asked Yahoo! to turn over the sender’s identity. Yahoo! claims they did not know the reason why the Chinese government was requesting, and complied with the Chinese Secret Police without argument. They identified Shi Tau, a reporter with The Contemporary Business News in Hunan, who is now serving 10 years in jail.
Jerry Yang, the multi-millionaire who sits at Yahoo!’s helm, told reporters that he had no choice in the matter. He alluded to the safety of his employees in China.
BooYahoo! believes that Yahoo!'s decisions are motivated by a single factor: profit. So it is clear that profits are the only way to provide them with feedback. Yahoo! chose to do business with the dragon, and now the Dragon's profits have apparently enslaved Yahoo!
Every human has certain inalienable rights that are not to be usurped by mere laws of mere governments. Anyone who says the law of the land is the bottom line is thinking like cattle. Yahoo!'s policy of abiding by the laws of whatever country wherein they do business is not a justification to dismantle freedom of speech.
Some people believe that a Western Internet company who is setting up shop in China should be willing to comply with human rights abuses there in order to create a glimmer of hope for the future of freedom and the availability of ideas. This is a dangerous and conveniently profitable deception. In the name of profits, Yahoo! is aiding Chinese oppression and eroding human rights globally. If the outermost tentacle of the internet's reach is poisoned, it must be amputated in order to protect the health of the entire organism. Yahoo! has become poisoned....
It’s time for netizens to exercise their power. It’s time to call for Yahoo! to stop complying with any governmental laws when those laws conflict with basic human rights. By impacting Yahoo!'s profits, we hope to change this policy, and encourage like companies to follow suit.
If Yahoo amends their policy of abiding by oppressive laws, our efforts to boycott them will end.
And BooYahoo isn't the only one calling for a boycott (see the Maple Leaf Blog):
Human rights watchdog Privacy International has called for a worldwide consumer boycott of Yahoo.
"A boycott would send a clear message to Yahoo shareholders and other companies which cheerfully sacrifice human rights in return for a cut of the Chinese market," said Privacy International director Simon Davies.
ArkSanctum says the following:
Actually, most Western internet companies are trumpeting the excuse that they have to abide by the laws of the localities in which parts of their operations reside, including Microsoft. Not really practical to boycott them all, but it just goes to show how business interests take precedent over the ethical side of things. Should these companies refuse to deal with oppressive regimes on moral grounds or should they forge ahead with making money? I think they'll opt for the latter, unfortunately.
Jamie at Blood & Treasure links to Dave at Running Dog:
CHINA'S new regulations on internet news may not actually be the lurch into the abyss of censorship and repression that some have been suggesting, but merely a clarification of established practice. After all, most of us are already aware of what the Chinese government is capable of, and for several of the country's biggest online news portals, which are already heavily regulated, it is likely to be business as usual....
A poster at Zona Europa doesn't think a boycott will do much good:
So now we come to the case of Yahoo! and Shi Tao. We are where we are. What is the end goal? I regard the end goal as changing the behavior of the Chinese government, with respect to a case like Shi Tao. The question is how to get there.
But here is what I see will unfold if the current boytcott-Yahoo! campaign unfolds:
- The western world pressures Yahoo! with a consumer boycott. Yahoo! folds and says that it will refuse to comply with any request from the Chinese government. The Chinese government will claim that Yahoo! is aiding and abetting criminal activities and ban all email from Yahoo.com.cn (as well as Yahoo.com and other local Yahoo! service) into China.
... you can insert any number of other transnational email services here.
The net effect is that any boycotted-and-surrendering service will be banned in China. How hard is that to implement? They wouldn't need any special Cisco hardware to do that. Even I can write a piece of software that will automatically reject Yahoo.com.cn and other email services on any mail server.
Meanwhile, what will the Chinese users do? They have just been shut out of Yahoo.com.cn, and so on. So they will just have to go to Sohu.com, 263.com or whatever. Those are Chinese email servers that will not be affected by any western boycott. It is not as if the Chinese Internet users have no email services to choose from.
What is the net effect? It means JACK to people inside China. All you have done is inconvenience them with respect to relocating and informing their contacts. They will just hate whoever made this happen. It may make the people outside who organized the boycotts very happy because they made a few corporations bend to their wills and therefore show that they have power and influence. But so what?...
How will a Yahoo! boycott change things inside China!? Draw a roadmap for the uninitiated such as myself because the activists obviously know something that I don't. I suggest that there is no such roadmap. Meanwhile, I have not detected even a hint of interest about this inside China. Remember that there are 100+ million Internet users inside China. How many of them give a damn about the Yahoo! boycott?
There may actually be a point here. We're conditioned to think that Person X in Country Y thinks exactly like we do. That's why we subconsciously assumed that once Saddam was overthrown, the Iraqis would become good Republicans and Democrats and confine their "wars" to nasty political ads against each other. Similarly, there's an underlying assumption that if the Communist regime were overthrown, the billion plus Chinese would automatically opt for truth, justice, and the American way.
But certain elements will counter, "C'mon, O, are you making the invalid assumption that Iraqis and Chinese are lower life forms? Don't put these people down by saying that they are incapable of democracy. All higher life forms are perfectly and completely capable of democracy. They've just been brainwashed by their corrupt ruler to operate in abnormal ways. Someone needs to teach the Chinese what Democracy is all about."
Yeah! Jeely kly! Ye gods!
Comments
"The shareholders wouldn't stand for it. Imagine the CEO would reported, "We are protesting human rights violations in China, which will result in lower profits this quarter." That CEO would be out of a job very quickly in our profit-profit-profit environment."
You obviously did some research here. I should say to one of the people you quoted that the movement ot boycott Yahoo! isn't designed to help the people in China, per se (otherwise we'd just boycott Chinese goods) but it's to preserve free speech on the internet. What happened in China could happen in the United States next.