I started to write this as a comment to a Jeff Jarvis post about some agressive questioning Yahoo’s Terry Semel apparently endured about its operations in China. But it got to be rather long so I thought I’d post it here instead.
May I suggest that people who are concerned about this actually go to China and spend some time there before you decide what is good or bad about Yahoo, Google etc. being there?
My wife is from China, I’ve spent some time there and I’ll be spending a lot more there over the next two years.
Here’s my read on China vis a vis democracy, freedom etc. (And it’s just one man’s opinion, so jump in with another view if you wish).
Political rights in China will incrementally grow based on specific issues. In other words, no one is going to march in the streets over abstract concepts like “freedom” and “democracy.” Rather, just like in the US with the Stamp Act, the election of Abe Lincoln, the Montgomery bus boycott etc, political freedom will be fought over very specific issues driven by the sense that something needs to change right now.
The two biggest simmering political issues in China right now (again IMO) are the environment and property rights. Let’s take the environment as an example.
The pollution there is terrible and people are pissed that 1) their drinking water is not clean and 2) many times a local official has been bribed to allow it to continue. Last fall there was a major spill of toxic chemicals in the Songhua river near Harbin (the primary center of China’s beer industry, BTW). I’ll bet my house that, prior to that event, a plant inspector was given a few thousand RMB to look the other way. And I’ll also bet that, because that spill got intense media attention and there were protests about it, that guy has been fired and the local party apparatus is intensely focused on not letting it happen again. (Yep.)
What does this have to do with Google and Yahoo? Here’s the point:
We think of censorship primarily as something that affects the media. This is what we don’t like about China – they censor press reports about, say, Tianenmen Square (which BTW local Chinese refer to as “6–4”, which is short for June 4, 1989). But what use is that information in the context of a toxic spill at Harbin? The short answer: none. And what information is useful? Here are some suggestions:
- The chemical makeup of benzene (which I believe was part of the spill)
- Likely symptoms of ingesting benzene, and how to treat them
- How to test your water for benzene
Those are pretty benign, but what about these:
- Documentation of safe drinking water levels for certain chemicals as specified by governments of the US, Europe, Japan, Korea etc.
- The history of environmental regulation in the West
- The text of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
- Tips on how to organize a peaceful protest
- The history of the US Civil Rights movement
I will also bet my house that none of these pieces of very useful information have been censored because 1) the Chinese government has its hands full with porn and breaking news and 2) most of these are the basis of research and scholarship at companies and universities – they need access to this info too.
Most people in the West don’t realize that there are literally tens of thousands of public protests every year in China. Yahoo and Google help make these protests possible not by supplying pictures of Tianenmen Square and access to blogger rants about freedom, but rather by helping people access the information that is relevant to the issue at hand.
Also, the questioning directed at Semel asked him if Yahoo would’ve cooperated with Nazi Germany. This is a red herring for a few reasons:
- Back in 1936, not even the US governement acknowledged the persecution of Jews there. The Holocaust was not widely reported until after the war. It’s unlikely Yahoo execs would’ve know any more about it than the average citizen. Which is to say, almost nothing. Executives must make decisions based on the known facts, not hypotheticals.
- Germany was an agressively expansionist state seeking to subjugate Europe and build an empire. While China undoubtedly would like military supremacy in the region, it’s not going to happen as long the US continues to have bases surrounding it. China appears to have no desire to invade other countries except for Taiwan, and that issue transcends Yahoo in the same way as the tensions between India and Pakistan.