Thu 14 Jan 2010
China: Google’s possible exile leads to cyber protests; Netizens on move
Posted by Bob Chen under Balkers
[6] Comments
If you reached this Balkingpoints.com article by direct external link, stop by the front page for an incredible satellite view of the earth in rotation!
Do no evil, Google says. But the irony is that it did help the Chinese government block sensitive information from the Chinese internet users, which is necessary for it to operate in China. However, this time it seems to be really provoked and made its simmering feud with the authority public. Google is likely to quit China.
The post on Google blog states the Google China has been suffering from cyber attacks and also, the information of its clients, many of them human rights advocates, were accessed by third party.
What is more well-known is its self-censorship. For example, typing in words such as Tiananmen in Google.cn will never return you pictures or texts about the 1989 incident.
So, when last night Google announced it would lift the censorship, the Chinese internet users flooded to the website to search for all the sensitive terms they never had a chance to access. In twitters, forums, discussion boards, we witness an explosion of talks about Google and its possible departure, or exile, from China.
On Twitter, pzhtx said,
In the list of pop tags, “Tiananmen” rises to the first place. The Chinese netizens are saying goodbye to Google in this way.
People were mourning that they are now restricted inside the largest LAN network in the world, which is encircled by the strict censorship and the Great Firewall.
A tweet is madly circulated on the internet:
The sin of facebook is that it helps people know who they wanna know. The sin of Twitter is that it allows people to say what they wanna say. The sin of Google is that it lets people find what they wanna find, and Youtube let us see what we wanna see. So, they are all kicked away.
It directly affects millions of netizens, because since Google’s expansion in China, its search engine, Gmail, and Google Doc have been widely used. A netizen in Xiaonei, which is a social network website popular among young people, was panic:
I saw that “Google planned to quit the Chinese market”. I was scared awake…My Gmail, My Google docs, my Google Search, and my internet.
These days are uncommon for Chinese cyberspace. Baidu has just been hacked by self-alleged Iranian hackers, which prompted a cyber war. As a Chinese local search engine with the largest market share, Baidu is often compared with Google. Its reputation is blackened because of its stronger censorship and the fact that it has removed search returns about poisonous milk after taking money from the producers.
Baidu will show you nothing that you shouldn’t know, but Google is the opposite. It knows too much.
Google is highly praised among internet users:
Google quit Chinese market?! A firm of backbone! In a place without democracy, Google prefers to quit. What is more important, money or morality? I won’t say foreigners are impolite anymore, because they have shown us what it means by ‘sacrifice oneself for justice’. Look at the Chinese nowadays, the merit of ancestors were gone. I am ashamed to call us the offspring of the Huaxia Great China.
A sarcastic price of words is getting quite popular around the cyberspace.
People born in 90s: Today I stepped out of the Great Firewall and saw a foreign website named Google. Shit, it is all but a copy of Baidu.
Born in 00s: What do you mean by stepping out of Great Firewall?
Born in 10s: What do you mean by website?
Born in 20s: What is ‘foreign’?
Tang Peng shouted: Great Party, Long live the CCP dynasty!! Finally Google would like to quit the Chinese market ‘voluntarily’!!
People soon make up how the state-run media CCTV might comment on the incident.
Recently because Google encountered issues such as obscene search returns, infringement on copyrights, it is boycotted by the Chinese netizens. Also due to the decreasing revenue, it is considering to quit the Chinese market. This is another case of boycotting a perverted foreign website by Chinese people.
Right now, a campaign to put flowers to the Google offices in China is gaining momentum on the internet. It is thought to be a way to memorize Google and express the grief and anger against censorship. In front of the Google Beijing office, people have started to take action for a flower commemoration.
Google is seeing now their mistake made when they agreed to conform to China’s government-run ISP’s in 2006. They knew they were censoring content and should have drawn the line then and never played along.
Now it is basically saying it can and will get by without the Chinese market until it has regime change. Better late than never I suppose!
Excellent post Bob. Perhaps nothing pressures the Politburo of the Communist Party of China, as much as this issue of free Internet access & expression. The situation appears akin to the Pandora’s Box opened up by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980′s, with his policy of Glasnost. Speech freedom, is a bell that once rung can never be unrung.
In Shanghai in November, a question got through to Obama in his town hall regarding the Internet “firewall”. The questioner was referring to censorship by his government of full access to the WWW . Now equipped by the millions with the amenity of computers, you couldn’t watch that and not feel that those students abhor such restrictions and may well dismantle them when they are leading China.
History proves that governments and societies are stronger in freely airing dissent and all it’s clamor, than they ever are by suppressing it.
Mainland Chinese may not know what exactly is being kept from them, but appear to be well aware that they indeed view the internet through rigid filters. If Google will now permit Tiananmen searches at Google.cn, I believe Chinese will soon find themselves blocked from accessing the site entirely.
Can someone explain why many American websites, including PBS, censor Canadians from viewing their programmes online?
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Strangely, 75% of WNED Buffalo/Toronto’s “Contributions from Viewers like you” come from Canadians, so they’re cutting their own throats by antagonising their best customers, friends, cousins & neighbours. (It’s likely the same for Detroit and other USA-Canada border PBS stations.)
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(The BBC had(has?) a similar policy for non-UK online viewers. “This is not available for your region.”)
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Irony … or Hypocrisy: we whine about China & Google and do the same in the West? (Ok, so we’re ‘better’ – we don’t do hacking espionage, but censorship is still censorship.)
Welcome aboard cuzLorne. That absolutely would not make economic sense for those sites – agreed.
I’m able to pull up BBC with no difficulty from Cincinnati, video a/OK. It does seem to be clips not full programs.
I wonder if it could be filtering at the juncture of your ISP. I would call up their technical staff and ask them why you cannot see those shows!
If they cannot give you a straight answer, I’d go to one of your Province representatives over it and keep pushing until you receive a satisfactory answer & resolution.
Much to our liking, Canadians are making their way onto B/P with no problems it seems… :^)
And your remarks also remind me that this Balk needs an update – things
hit the fan for Google vs. China this week.
Google’s lonely stand for human rights in China
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published a book with what may be the best title ever: “The End of History and the Last Man.” In it, he argued that the end of the Cold War represented the triumph of liberal democracy as the “final form of human government.” Recently, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and a thoughtful man, begged to differ. The Great Wall of China stood in the way.
Google, as you must know, has pulled out of China proper and relocated to Hong Kong. The company took this action after it was hacked in China by persons apparently looking to spy on the e-mails of Chinese dissidents. Those who know Brin, though, say that the hacking was just the last straw. Mostly, he was weary of adhering to China’s censorship policies, which, he said in a brief interview with the Wall Street Journal, had gotten increasingly severe after the 2008 Olympics. When the world looked away, China took off the gloves.
For Brin, this was something of a personal disappointment. He is a Russian immigrant and the son of a man who suffered under the old communist regime. He is one of those people who thought that China’s acceptance of American companies would liberalize the country. Above all, the Internet was going to do wonders. It was the ultimate liberalizing machine — a communications medium that by its very nature could evade the censors with their clumsy, antediluvian red pencils. Bill Clinton, no naif about anything, struck just the right cliche when in 2000 he mocked China’s attempt to control the Web: “Good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” Now look: The Jell-O’s on the wall.
Maybe more to the point, the optimistic note struck by Fukuyama and others has been forcefully challenged, if not rebutted, by the Chinese. Their view of progress, they emphasize, is not our own. The free expression of ideas leads to chaos. Dissent is treason. China is too unmanageable not to be severely and ruthlessly managed. The Internet should not be a force for liberalization. It should be a force to encourage conformity. Let a thousand intellectual flowers bloom — as long as they all bloom identically.
What’s particularly chilling about the Chinese position is that it is unapologetic. From Beijing, you do not get sweet equivocations and buttery lies — the adamant claim that there is no censorship or, as with the old Soviet Union, the insistence that all those dour people you saw on the street were really brimming with happiness. On the contrary, the Chinese say that their system is their system — take it or leave it. Brin and Google chose to leave it.
I quote now from this year’s State Department report on human rights regarding China: “On Feb. 8, Li Qiaoming was reportedly beaten to death in a detention center. . . . Prison officials initially claimed he died after accidentally running into a wall during a game of ‘hide and seek.’ ”
I quote some more: “In March Li Wenyan died while in custody. . . . The Xinhua official press quoted a senior prison official as stating that Li died while having a ‘nightmare.’ ”
I could quote even more. But the point is that this is China and this is where American firms have elected to do business. I understand the constraints and imperatives — the amorality of business, the virtue of profit, the belief that shareholder equity trumps human rights, the vast size of that vast market and how, by golly, if they could open a plant in China they could make that country a bit more like Switzerland.
This bald hypocrisy is why virtually no American firm has joined Google — not Microsoft and not Yahoo — or said they could not do business in a place where people were seized by the police and executed without so much as even a show trial. Business, as we all know from the “Godfather” movies, is business.
Maybe in the end, the Internet will actually ameliorate conditions in China and maybe the Chinese will succumb to exogenous pressures and liberalize their system. But Google, which admirably walked away from the biggest cellphone market in the world — that and not its search engine was the real prize — has shown that in the meantime the price of doing business in China is not its overvalued currency but its undervalued human rights. In this sense, history has not ended. Along with too many American businesses, it has just moved offshore.
© 2010 The Washington Post Company