I had this thought as a way to incentivize the free flow of information, which in my understanding tends to inevitably lead to increased freedom and better human rights.
All the relatively wealthy and free-ish countries in the world – US, Canada, most of Europe, Japan, Australia, NZ, South Korea, and maybe a few others, get together and hit a big “reset” button on global trade, as follows:
No more economic sanctions (but see below). Instead, unrestricted trade is a privilege which we extend to any country that has no restrictions on information available to their citizenry via the internet (i.e. like the list in the previous paragraph, assuming my understanding is correct). So China gets the privilege of trade with the world’s wealthy consumers as long as any Chinese person can look at any website that’s available to Americans and Europeans. We’d have a grace period of something like 5 or 10 years to give governments a chance to transition. But that’s the only requirement (or maybe tack on a few extra like genocide and WMD usage). Nice and simple, and no more sanctions – Iranians and North Koreans can enjoy free trade and all their governments have to do is open up the internet to their citizenry.
This assumes that I’m correct that the free flow of informationinevitably lead to increased freedom and better human rights. Is there reason to believe this is not accurate? How would China (obviously the most significant country that could be harmed by this arrangement) react to this? Could we expect the other countries listed above to sign and abide by the terms of this arrangement in the long-term? Any other thoughts?
Seems like something that would be tricky to enforce and monitor. The “Average American and European” has many thousands of websites they can access. Does America send people undercover into all foreign nations and then try to access all 200,000 websites to see if they are accessible?
I don’t think it would be paticularly hard, technically speaking – have a handful (few hundred or few thousand) of (anonymous?) volunteers in each country download software X which is designed specifically to check the accessibility of a variety of types of websites, and every month they “check in” with the Global Free Trade Authority (or whoever) and their software reports whether the internet is still widely accessible. Maybe a handful of small websites might get knocked down every so often, but as long as the big ones (big news sites, big discussion sites, big video sites, big research sites, big wikis, etc.) are available, then the citizenry has access to most of the information on the web.
The idea doesn’t sound bad, per se. I just find it doubtful that China or such nations would ever agree to it. Not only would it undermine their regime, but nobody likes being told by someone else what to do.
But wouldn’t the lack of consumers for China’s industry also undermine their regime (by causing a massive recession, if not worse)? Which would their leaders prefer, given the choice – liberalization of information, or no more trade with wealthy countries? And wouldn’t their citizenry demand this freedom of information, once they thought it might be available?
Not that I think you’re necessarily wrong – I am indeed “just floating the idea”, and haven’t exactly done any homework about it.
China has had a massively swelling middle class. It won’t be long before they will be able to run much of their economic engine based off of internal domestic consumption alone. America might be the nation worse off if China doesn’t blink - Americans are highly dependent on Made in China products (for the time being, at least).
As for a nation like North Korea, I think no chance. For Beijing to let its people read foreign news is one thing; for North Korea, that kind of massive liberalization of information is a recipe for disaster; plus, Pyongyang has almost no trade whatsoever with America right now at the moment. They’d probably think, we’d gotten this far without Washington and we can continue without Washington.
I’n Pretty close to a free speech absolutist and I conceptually like the idea. Unfortunately, I think we’d be denounced as cultural imperialists seeking to inflict our decadent capitalist propaganda on the good people of Blankablankastan as a condition of trade, instead of respecting their culture.
The major flaw with this plan is that some countries want to isolate their populace from outside influence, and would put up with sanctions in order to accomplish that goal. North Korea comes to mind. One of the things that destabilizes monarchies like North Korea’s is foreign media reveal the depth of the lies that the regime is telling. There was a story years ago about a man that fled North Korea for South Korea via China. He said that the thing that made him realize the regime was lying was see a news report about a South Korean transit strike on state TV, in the background behind the picket line there were tons of taxis on the road, since the buses weren’t running. The thing that stood out to him was how many taxis existed in Seoul. He assumed that if South Korea had so many taxis, then their people must not be starving. This is a case of state propaganda misfiring, but it illustrates that a simple but of information can spark rebellion. North Korea would totally put up with not being able to get Jack Daniels, if it meant also not being subjected to Wikipedia.
I have no illusion this would do anything about regimes like North Korea – they’ve continued with virtually no international trade, and their leadership appears okay with this. But I’m not sure about China – I think they need the rest of the world to continue their economic expansion. Not that I’m an expert by any means.
I think it’s an interesting thought. The question though is what happens after this 5, 10, 20 year grace period expires and China still isn’t abiding by the criteria. The western world couldn’t afford to cut trade ties, just as China couldn’t afford to lose their exportatation. It’d be a staredown, and every step of the way politicians would be trying desperately to avert it. I imagine that, country by country, governments would begin to withdraw from the agreement.
The flip side of the proposition seems more realistic. Establish a grading criteria for freedom of the web and a set means of measuring it. Alongside the criteria is a sliding set of sanctions. This would motivate governments to restrict their citizenry less, and give them the option to continue doing so as their economy gets better.
Rescinding tariffs is nearly always a good idea. But that’s for economic reasons - free trade, in general, is better than protectionism. (Yes, yes, I know - Trump’s trade policies are stupid. Take that as a given.)
That having been said, what do we get out of this deal? OK, it sux that a billion Chinese can’t surf for porn or update their Facebook status or read CNN. Therefore, five years from now we shut off the trade in rare earths and cell phone components until the Chicoms let them. What do we gain, that offsets the fact that we are abandoning comparative advantage?
Not to mention that this isn’t going to give the West much leverage against places like North Korea.
And if we want China to do something about global warming, it is going to look a little feeble to say that we will assist them in rebuilding their economy so they don’t emit more GHG than the US and the EU put together, but not trade with them because they don’t allow everyone to have Internet access.
I think it’s possible that China might give in, at least to some extent, if there is a truly united front of their best customers/consumers (i.e. all the other wealthy countries). Or perhaps they’d be willing to negotiate, and there’d be a deal similar to that offered earlier in the thread by Apanthro with a sliding scale – some trade in exchange for some internet freedom. Or something like that.
But the gain to the US and the west is the possibility of a more free China, which I think would be enormously beneficial to the world.
This plan would do very little about NK, aside from the future benefits from a free China, if achieved. A free China might inevitably spill over into NK due to their close ties.
This deal doesn’t address climate change at all, and this would be a reasonable consideration. It is, after all, just off the top of my head.
Taking a cynical look at this, some would say that it sure is fishy to tie internet freedom to trade. America, the world giant in intellectual property and media, demands you let your citizens use our internet but don’t worry too much about harvesting organs from political prisoners.
The main obstacle with this proposal is still the way it comes across. It comes across as a not-so-subtle form of manipulation, or patronizing, and there is no way for Beijing to agree to it without appearing worse off. In a culture like China’s which highly values face, they’re not going to want to sign on to any agreement that gives the impression of “America demanded that we do X, we caved in and submitted to X, they won and are now all high and haughty.” China is particularly allergic to anything that feels like caving in to foreign powers after its ‘Century of Humiliation’ from the mid-1800s-1900s at the hands of the Japanese, British, etc.
How, specifically, would a free Internet in China (or Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or Cuba) benefit the world? Specifically.
Keeping in mind that the ruling authorities in those countries in particular have a vested interest in the status quo. What do we do if Putin **and **the Saudis **and **the Chinese Communist party bosses say No?