This is a tricky one. I’ve asked my three Chinese friends about this (yes, I know: a nice representative sample of the entire billion), and I’ve gotten the same answer: it’s not a big deal.
“It doesn’t bother you that the Chinese government is censoring all references to Taiwan not being a part of China?”
“But Taiwan is a part of China!”
Open mouth; insert foot.
There doesn’t seem to be much passion about censorship in my extensive study. And I’d imagine that if you’re willing to swallow some of the other restrictions the Chinese place on things (like reproduction), having your search engine filtered isn’t that big a deal.
I think it’s wrong, but it’s the smart move on Google’s part, even if it isn’t the moral high road. In the end, if the Chinese government is going to change, it’s the people of China who will have to change it. Societies tend to gravitate towards freedom; corporations tend to cast all other considerations aside when it comes to profit.
I wrote a paper on this issue for a class last semester, talking about the ethics involved with the Internet and how it crosses political borders. The Internet may be an American invention but it is a medium used in many many other countries, all of which have their own laws. China has it’s Golden Wall firewall which is much more restrictive than many people realize, and for google to even gets its foot in the door when it can theoretically provide such a hole for the government to try and fight, is amazing.
The fact that internet companies are beginning to face pressure from other countries isn’t surprising. And I tend to believe that Google is trying to bend as little as possible while still being allowed past the Chinese firewall.
I think it should be pointed out that Google isn’t doing anything China itself hasn’t already done. They’ve blocked Wikipedia as a whole, they’ve blocked Google as a whole and they’ve blocked thousands of other sites. So when Google is allowed in under the requirements of censorship, they’re at least getting let in in some form.
And it’s already being reported that purposeful typos and other tricks are defeating the censorship - and if China forces them to close that hole, users will find a new way to get around it. It’ll just take some time.
Ancient Rome went from a representitive democracy to a dictatorship. Germany was a democracy before Hitler, Iran has pretty steadily become a less democratic and free country since the revolution, Russia has become steadly less free under Putin. Counterexamples of this quote abound.
I’ve lived in China for a year and a half now, and it’s certainly possible to find anti-PRC stuff on the web in English, and even in Chinese. The government has restricted many sites, but there are plenty more out there, as well as mirrors of some of the restricted ones. However, most Chinese internet users I’ve talked to don’t search out contrary opinions and probably wouldn’t even if it was as easy as a web search. This holds especially true for core tenets like the Taiwan issue, where the government propaganda has worked so well that all contrary info is viewed as a separatist and foreign conspiracy. The government opinion saturates all of the stuff that is considered mainstream over here, and who but the kooks would seek out fringe foreign and underground stuff?
Of course, if the internet were completely open in China, there would probably be a lot more activity with regards to things like flagrant judicial abuses and worker strikes, which are often due to migrant workers not getting paid. It’s amazing that despite the thousands of such protests that occur, very few people know about incidents in other regions. A free internet might lead some to start sharing information and organizing things on a larger scale, and this is probably what the government fears most. So, the roadblocks in Google won’t keep out foreign opinions, but I don’t think that’s their concern. Practically no one is going to be convinced that Taiwan is its own nation, and that Tibet should be free. It’s ease of access to uncensored accounts of local and national activities that they fear, and restricting Google will maintain the difficulty in accessing that info.
Should Google not comply? I think it would be good if they didn’t, because it would be a loud and clear proclamation about the censorship in the country that will be very difficult to ignore, since Google is so ubiquitous. But it wouldn’t make much of a difference, methinks.
People are missing the big story here. You don’t defeat facism and censorship by sealing it off from outside influences. I mean, geez, look how great that’s wroked with Cuba for goodness sakes.
Microsoft is currently struggling with the same issue: they have 3 million Chinese bloggers on their service. Do they just cut out and shut down all those blogs to protest the Chinese government’s shutdown of a few? Does that make any sense at all?
In the past few years, blogging has exploded in China, and despite the censorship, the decentralization of information (instead of “from state to people” it’s “people to people”) has already started to change China for the better. All sorts of local scandals and corruptions and screwups have been blown into the public Chinese consciousness. The government is quickly learning that it cannot play hush up like it used to. They are already losing control over te distribution of information.
Asking Google to stay out of China is rigidly applying a principle while completely forgetting what the principle was supposed to achieve in the first place.