Dave Winer has a post arguing “maybe there’s more to Google-China than meets the eye.”
My wife is from China and my brother-in-law is a member of the Chinese Communist Party who works for the finance ministry. (Seriously.) If you talk to him, he’ll tell you they’re scared shitless that American’s will stop buying their products and stop building factories there. We wring our hands about jobs going overseas. They wring theirs over dependence on foreign capital. Yes, they hold a lot of our debt, but all the treasury bonds in the world are no good if you can’t redeem them. Dave seems to think the Chinese government will operate unilaterally, but he forgets that their hands are tied in many ways – by trade agreements, the WTO and, not to be forgotten, their own class of rich businessmen who don’t want to upset the apple cart.
The scenario he describes was much more likely to happen 35 years ago when Mao was still around and China basically had nothing to export except ideology. Intertwined economies make nutty political interference less likely, not more so.
China certainly has a lot of problems when it comes to individual liberty, but it has much more freedom now than even 10 years ago. As an example, there were something like 30,000 public protests there last year. Last September I watched several people stand outside a military compound and shout insults at the military over some grievance. As would be the case here, the guards pretty much ignored them. This would’ve been unthinkable when my wife was growing up. Now it’s common.
My point: China certainly has a long way to go, and censorship should of course be condemned. But the long-term trajectory of China is on our side and there’s no compelling – that is, financial – reason for them to do a 180.