Google in China: don’t be too evil

By lifting the filters from its Internet searches and threatening to pull out of China altogether, Google has made a bold move. But it could have come earlier.

About three years ago, I was speaking to a friend in her early 20s who had recently left China for the first time. She had grown up in a poor village south of Beijing, but was bright and had a high-school education. When I made a passing reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, she gave me a blank look. She had never heard of it. She spent the rest of the day on the Internet sifting through YouTube videos and reading everything she could. Her world was rocked.

It’s in this context that Google has been providing its users in China with censored searches since 2006. It’s part of a remarkably successful effort to control what information its citizens come across. Search for Tiananmen Square in most of the world and you get a picture of a man and a tank. In China, you’re more likely to get snaps of kids flying kites.

Until now, Google has maintained that by providing its users with a powerful search engine, it’s doing more good than, um, evil. But as I argued back in 2005, information companies that cooperate with censorship aren’t just providing a limited service to their customers. They’re lending the respectability of their name to a regime of censored information.

These corporations are not simply doing business in China, they are patching the only chink in the censors’ armor: China’s international reputation. [...] The 1980s boycott of South Africa hurt the apartheid regime as much by denying it respectability as by punishing its economy. In China, the private sector — specifically foreign companies — plays the opposite role. [...] By cooperating with the censors, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo blunt free-speech activists’ only remaining weapon.

Google’s move today does just the opposite. Whether the company is acting on ethical grounds, making a business decision, or deciding that acquiescing to the hacking of the gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists represents a level of cooperation it won’t accept, by going public with its concerns, Google puts China’s control of information front and center. As Emily Rauhala points out, searches for Tiananmen Square now pulls up the man with the tank. The declaration seems to have struck a chord with at least some in China. Chinese netizens have been laying flowers in front of Google’s Beijing office.  Some (on the Twittersphere, so caveats etc.) are saying that the act has been given an official name 非法献花 (illegal flowers), and that the term has already been flagged for censorship.

So what happens next? It’s hard to imagine that the Chinese government will cave to Google’s demands, so if the company is going to stick to its guns, it will almost certainly have to pull up stakes. My guess is that China will take the tactics it has used in the censorship of information and play them on the corporate stage.

Information filtering of the kind that Google has participated in until today is just one tool in the Chinese toolkit. There’s no way that the censors can keep the lid on everything. The technically savvy have tools for getting around the censors, and there are always those brave enough to push the boundaries. So Beijing supplements its efforts with a heavy dose of intimidation; the harsh prosecution of a few high-profile cases keeps the rest of the masses in line.

That approach can be seen in a 2004 sentencing law cracking down on Internet pornography, which is illegal in China. The law judges the seriousness of the offense not on a site’s content but on its popularity. A Web master receiving more than 250,000 visitors might face life imprisonment. “The way to think about it is that they want to cap people’s influence,” says Jeremy Goldkorn, whose blog Danwei [banned in Chinas since I wrote this] reported on the law.

China keeps its laws against political expression a secret. But those making too big a splash on the Web can expect a threatening phone call or have their site shut down. Persistence leads to the loss of a job or to arrest. According to Reporters Without Borders, China has at least 62 Internet dissidents behind bars, more than any other country. Intimidation stops what the filters miss.

In the corporate world, the implied threat has been the withdrawal of access to China’s markets. What lessons will other companies draw if Google loses its Chinese operations? That’s it’s possible to walk away and survive? Or that its best to buckle under the pressure from Beijing?

If you followed the original justifications offered by many American Internet companies for launching businesses in China, or the congressional hearings on the matter in 2006, you will recall that the argument that even a censored presence in China improved access to information for Chinese Internet users was central. If Google repudiates that argument it will put pressure on other American Internet firms currently toeing the regulatory line in China, especially Microsoft, and weaken one of their core public arguments for a continued presence in China. Then again, it may also represent an opportunity for [Microsoft]. After all, “Google” doesn’t phoneticize well in Chinese, as the flap over the “谷歌” brand demonstrated. But “Bing” works quite nicely indeed.