Taipei Times: China is shaping the Internet, and not vice versa

NY Times News Service

Wednesday, Sep 21, 2005

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 Hunan 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, the reporters were warned not to take notes.

But Shi Tao, one of the journalists, did. He e-mailed them to a Chinese dissident in the US, who posted them on the Internet. A few months later, 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 Shi? His newly published verdict states that the prosecution relied in part on information given to the government by Shi's e-mail provider, Yahoo.

The US has a bipartisan human rights policy in China. It is called trade. The idea is that Western companies will bring Western values -- especially when they develop the Internet, supposedly an unstoppable force for openness. But Shi's fate is the latest piece of evidence that it's not working out that way.

China now has more than 100 million Internet users, more than any nation but the US. But as the Internet booms, China is growing more politically closed. Its government has used the Internet masterfully as a steam valve, allowing Chinese to participate in a world that is modern in all senses but one.

A controlled Internet may seem like an oxymoron, but China has one. 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 in 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.

US 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 misuses 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.

Snitching on a client to totalitarian police is still another category of bad behavior, a move that should shrivel the keyboard fingers of Yahoo users everywhere. Since Chinese legal verdicts so rarely come to light, it is unclear how commonly this occurs. It has always been easy to imagine China's government asking Internet companies for the e-mail of, say, a foreign businessman competing against a Chinese business or government entity. Now it is easy to imagine Yahoo complying.

The company admits it linked the e-mail to 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 Shi is in Hong Kong. It has no more obligation to obey China's security laws than does Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California.

It was the force of capitalist profits, not communist law, that compelled Yahoo to hand over Shi and its unapologetic response seems devised to ingratiate Yahoo further with Beijing. Last month, Yahoo spent a billion dollars to buy a 40 percent share of Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce company. It was the single largest foreign investment in China's Internet sector, and like everything else in China, it would not have happened without the good will of the party.

The Chinese market is so delicious that companies will do almost anything to get in and stay there. A few anecdotes among many: Rupert Murdoch banned the BBC from Star TV, his China satellite network, after the BBC ran reports about human rights in China.

In the mid-1990s, Chrysler in Beijing refused to rehire a Jeep factory worker who missed work while locked up for holding a Christian ceremony commemorating Tiananmen. Only direct lobbying by Chrysler's chairman got him his job back.

In 1999, Fortune magazine held a conference in Shanghai to mark the 50th year of Communist Party rule. The conference was one great big icky fawning session. Gerald Levin, the Time Warner chairman, presented then Chinese President Jiang Zemin with a bust of Lincoln. Sumner Redstone, chief executive of Viacom, told the meeting that Western media groups "should avoid being unnecessarily offensive to the Chinese government."

In many important ways, foreign investment has been good for the Chinese people. It has lifted living standards greatly. China's desire to trade has encouraged new permission for thousands of Chinese to study abroad, which is also a force for liberalization. Foreign businesses have promoted legal reform, although largely in commercial law.

But let's not pretend that foreign investment will make China a democracy. That argument was born out of desperation and self-interest. Because China is too lucrative a market to resist, US and European businessmen have ended up endorsing the party line through their silence -- or worse. They are not molding China; China is molding them.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2005/09/21/2003272580