 With a high-profile global summit and Nobel Peace Prize in tow, the Obama administration has iterated its commitment to reducing the number of nuclear weapons worldwide. This noble goal has led in recent months to drastically improved Sino-U.S. relations. Washington has relied on Beijing to draw North Korea to the multiparty negotiating table and offer Pyongyang incentives to suspend its nuclear program. The U.S. has also leaned on China to support its call for sanctions against Iran. In exchange for China's cooperation in these matters, Obama has not slammed Beijing on its poor human rights record or insisted on a revaluation of the Yuan.
But in March this year, Sino-U.S. relations came to a head over the provocative decision by Google Inc. to re-route internet searches from mainland China to its Hong Kong-based site. The decision followed an announcement in January - in the wake of cyber attacks from within China - that Google was no longer willing to censor the search results on Google.cn, its Chinese site. Google's goal in rerouting internet traffic from the mainland was to preserve its commitment to the freedom of information while continuing to do business in China.
Google explained that its search site for Chinese users would henceforth be hosted on Hong Kong-based servers, which would release the company from adhering to China's strict censorship laws. Only the company's online maps and music search service would continue to be hosted on servers based in the mainland. Google assured its stockholders that this change of operations was entirely legal. But the company's chief legal officer had to concede that it was now up to the Chinese government to decide whether or not to block access to Google's services.
The initial reaction to Google's announcement came from the business community, which pointed out that from a financial perspective, the search giant's decision to withdraw from the Chinese market was low impact. A research firm, Analysys International, revealed that that Google's internet search market share was trailing behind that of the indigenous firm Baidu Inc. (the former had 36 per cent, while the latter enjoyed over 58 per cent). Indeed, Google.cn accounted for less than two per cent of the company's net revenue. However, some business analysts cautioned that Google's decision could work against it in the long term - China is the world's largest internet market with 400 million web users, and is growing by 40 per cent a year.
But Google's announcement to no longer censor Chinese content did not make headlines because of its fiscal impact. The corporation was backtracking on its difficult decision, made in 2006, to abide by Chinese censorship laws, and the about-turn was taken as an indication that American companies were fated to have a difficult time expanding into the Chinese market while playing by Beijing's rules. This notion of American interests and the Chinese government having competing value systems forced Google's decision to transcend the realm of business and instead grapple with tough ideological questions.
In a statement explaining its decision, Google claimed that it was taking the "unusual step" of reporting cyber attacks that originated in China because they went "to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech" and access to information. The fact is, the growing popularity of the internet in China was perceived as a sign of the country's willingness to keep up with global trends. But its crackdown against Google, which prompted the corporation's withdrawal from the mainland, confirmed that the country, rather than integrating, was moving in a different direction. American Senator Byron Dorgan put it best: "China wants to be in the marketplace of goods but keep the marketplace of ideas outside their country." He added that China could not be considered a full member of the international community until it allowed for a free flow of ideas.
The sense that Google's withdrawal from mainland China was a free speech issue, and not merely a commercial decision, was driven home by U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. In a speech delivered a few days after Google's announcement, she criticized nations that hamper their citizens' access to information, emphasizing that such actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
Article 19 of the declaration states that all people have the right to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Moreover, Article 12 guards against hacking, cyber attacks, and the use of internet protocol information or email data to identify or locate internet users: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Responding to the free speech and access to information rhetoric surrounding Google's operational change, the Chinese government was unrepentant. It did not acknowledge Google's claims that China had blocked access to its YouTube site in the summer of 2009, or that Google's servers had been the target of sophisticated cyber attacks that originated in mainland China. Instead, the State Council Information Office claimed that Google had "violated its written promise" to censor contact as per Chinese law. The government also warned against politicizing the issue.
But the issue had been politicized from day one, when Google framed its decision as a pro-free-speech measure. For that reason, the Chinese state media soon began justifying its system of the Great Firewall and other censorship measures. Several articles argued that China had no option but to filter online content, the majority of which is generated in the U.S. and other western countries, and therefore loaded with aggressive rhetoric against countries like China that refuse to sacrifice their sovereignty. Such articles went on to declare that it was in China's national interest to balance the information flow from the West in an effort to ensure political stability.
Chinese government officials also opined that the U.S. obsession with a supposedly free internet was another effort to enshrine American hegemony. One state-owned newspaper charged Washington with having a monopoly on internet infrastructure and using online technologies such as Twitter to bring about regime change in places like Iran.
China's adamant reaction opened a Pandora's box of questions on how private internet companies should best deal with the demands of governments to block or remove certain online content, or share information about local users and their virtual habits. The fact is, internet-based companies offering a variety of services will always be caught between the access to information clauses of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the idiosyncrasies (or authoritarian dictates) of ruling governments.
The best such companies can do is invest in more agile software, improved circumvention technologies, and a robust network of proxy servers that make it difficult for governments to block public access to the internet. Attempts by companies such as Google to navigate these tricky waters must be aided by international law and multi-partisan agreements. After all, as Salil Tripathi points out in a blog for the Guardian: "[Google] is a company, not a human rights organization. Nor is it a state."
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