They’re redirecting Chinese users to the Hong Kong site as of today, which evidently is not required by local law to self-censor search results. China could still block Google on their end, of course - but Google is doing everything possible to provide uncensored search results to mainland China residents.
Take that, censors! Boo-yah!
Sorry, but I just love this stuff. I used to live near the Chinese Embassy in DC, and the first time I saw the “Free Tibet” protestors come out, I made a point of asking one of the Embassy guards “Enjoying the free speech?” A bit of a jerk move, I suppose - but then, the fellow had taken up service for a government that brutally punishes political dissent.
Anyway - I greatly enjoy seeing good men and women thumb their nose at authoritarianism, and I hope Google continues doing it.
I can’t help but feel a bit pessimistic toward Google on this one. Despite all their efforts, they only gained about 13% of the search market before deciding to stop censoring. It seems if they were honestly primarily concerned with China’s censoring, they wouldn’t have done business with China in the first place rather than waiting a few years, realizing they couldn’t become #1, and spinning their failure as a ethically refusing to censor information…
That doesn’t seem to be what happened, though. They tried to bring the best service they could to the PRC, working in good faith with the government there. When that government made concerted efforts to violate the privacy of Google’s users, Google realized they could not treat the PRC government as good-faith actors - and is responding accordingly.
In the past year, and especially the past month, there has been an increase in nationalist us vs. them attitudes in China. The state-run China Daily has been full of increasingly shrill articles denouncing America and it’s policies. Indeed, fully half of the China Daily opinion articles for the past few weeks have been of the “we won’t bow to the imperialist Americans” variety. I have no doubts this is a well planned and coordinated attempt to manufacture a certain political climate.
There as also been a sharp increase in Internet controls in the past couple of years. We’ve seen Twitter, Youtube, all Blogspot sites and Facebook get blocked. I believe the entire province of Xinjiang still doesn’t have any meaningful net access. There is talk of requiring Net users to register using their real names and ID cards. Things are heating up.
The timing of this means that Google’s actions will be dragged into this.
At first, China tried to spin this as actually being about a copyright dispute. Now they have stepped it up and are also basically accusing Google of being deeply connected to the US government and saying the US government is using Google to further their own nefarious purposes. Check out some of the China Daily articles here. There is lots of talk about how Google wants to "violate national sovereignty, " etc. This is seen as a personal attack on all of China by all of America, not as a business move by one company.
One thing to remember- most people support the Internet controls or at most do not question them. Indeed, a fair number of my students are not even aware of them.
So I think it’s good that this move is causing people to talk about the subject. But it is playing into the increasing anti-American sentiment.
*Indeed, fully half of the China Daily opinion articles for the past few weeks have been of the “we won’t bow to the imperialist Americans” variety. I have no doubts this is a well planned and coordinated attempt to manufacture a certain political climate. *
Also, I just realized something:
You’re accusing the Chinese leadership of trying to forment a specific nationalistic political climate by writing inflammatory English-language articles in China Daily, a newspaper read mostly by foreigners. Not a very useful plan, you ask me.
China has laws, many of them are stupid. But if you want to do business here you follow the laws of the country. I don’t see what the big deal is. China has certain laws that we don’t have in America, many I think are stupid. I could raise a big stink about it, but doing a good job and living a quiet life here in China with my family is more important to me than doggedly making a martyr out of myself for some stupid cause as Google has done here. It’s pretty cut-and-dry: break the rules and you’re asking for trouble. When you KNOW you’re breaking the rules and you still do it, well, don’t cry about it when you get punished.
And Google isn’t crying. They are fully ready to accept whatever happens to them. It’s a corporate twist on classic disobedience.
The point is that it is interesting to see how this situation is being interpreted in China, and how that may or may not relate to what I (and many better informed commentators) see as a fairly sharp shift in attitudes towards America. Regardless of what you have experienced,* I have experienced this*.
Can we please stop turning every China thread into a personal thing? You have your story, I have mine. Let’s both post what we know, and let people decide for themselves. I’m really never trying to attack you or your experience or even China. Can you please just lay off me a bit?
And in other news the sun rises in the East. For at least the past few decades, this is what the China Daily English Language propaganda rag rolls out like clockwork a couple of times a year. (Note: the wire service articles are straight news though). Read some Doonesbury from the ***1970’s ***when Duke was the ambassador to China and reading propagada posters.
IMHO this is not a well planned and not a coordinated attempt to do anything except for score a few cheap points with a cynical public. Not unlike Rush Limbaugh.
Seriously, this is probably your first cycle of such blatant “news” and you’re giving it a lot more credence than it deserves. For example, this is nothing compared to the Belgrade embassy cough cough accidental bombing cough cough that took place not all that long ago…
True. Maybe lots of this is simply new to me. It’s hard to remember that while lots has changed, some things have stayed the same.
We have all be getting a lot more flack from our students lately, though.
I was confronted directly in the classroom the other day about Google, and given a rather speech in office hours by a student extremely disturbed about the US meeting with a Dalai Lama. Such direct confrontation over a controversial topic is pretty unusual for my usually meek students, and it does mirror what I am seeing in my (admittedly limited) access to the media. Maybe this change in climate is just a cyclical thing. But it does feel a bit different these days.
Thing is - in the US, we obey laws (even stupid ones) because they’re enacted by a democratic government. If enough people agree with me that the laws are stupid, we can change them. And I’m free to try to persuade people that the laws are stupid.
China has stupid laws that make it a serious crime to argue that the stupid laws are stupid, and these laws aren’t enacted by a democratic government. Why, then, shouldn’t people with the means and opportunity to do so disobey them at every opportunity? I’m not talking about you - but if Google can snub undemocratic laws that violate basic human rights norms, why shouldn’t they do so at every opportunity?
Being a law-abiding citizen is only a virtue when those laws have some sort of virtue.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of the situation is that there was an element of tit-for-tat to all of this. Google was willing to censor their results, but after the Chinese government launched a cyber attack on a number of companies(including Google) and hacked into the Gmail accounts of some Chinese dissidents, then the gloves came off. Google was playing by the rules (for which they took a lot of heat in the West); it was the Chinese who committed the first breach.
Google knew what they were getting into here. Google wanted to do business in China, China’s reputation for Net control is well-known around the world, Google knew they’d have to be censored, they still chose to come here, and now they’re complaining about something they knew would happen to them. Well, cry me a river. They knew what they were getting into. Rules are rules. Follow them or get out. Foreigners and foreign companies don’t get a special pass in China simply by grace of not being Chinese, that’s a lesson I learned and accepted long ago in this country. People who come here or companies that do business here would have a much easier time if they stopped being so self-righteous and naive and realized that they’re not going to change China. I don’t know why practically every self-important foreign guy (or self-important foreign company) who comes here thinks they’re going to enlighten the Chinese and rescue them from the prehistoric no-human-rights gulag existence everyone seems to think they live in.
To be honest? I don’t know and I don’t care. I have bills to pay, a family to take care of, a table that needs food put on it. I have more important and immediate things to worry about than my web search results getting censored. Suffice it to say, though, that if I was going to make a list of the most horrible human rights violations in history, “they wont let me use Facebook” or “they censor my Google search results” wouldn’t even make the charts.
This holds true to my experience. I’m hearing a lot of this same vitriol from my students. It worries me, because it is the young people who are embracing this sort of ultra-nationalism. You’ve got 20 year olds walking around like the opium wars happened yesterday.
I know it’s not normal for young people to be walking around with a huge historical chip on their shoulder that is coalescing into outright hate. Especially young people who are living in the best times their country has ever known, who have a future their grandparents could have never even dreamed. These young people should be full of hope and optimism. That’s why I have to believe someone is cultivating this, for some purpose.
No country that has embraced ultra-nationalism has done anything good with it.
:rolleyes: Hopefully someday my life can be as comfortable as yours, Baron Greenback, so that my biggest complaint will be that I can’t use Twitter. Until then…