GOOGLE’S ENDING of censorial filtering on its China service and its review of the company’s overall involvement in the Chinese internet market are much more than ordinary commercial decisions. Taken in response to the discovery that its operations there had been systematically attacked to access Chinese human rights activists’ e-mails, they raise fundamental questions, first about how compatible is the free flow of information with markets and then about the proper relationship between capitalism, democratic rights and the rule of law.
Google suspects the terms of its 2006 agreement with the Chinese government, allowing it to participate in the world’s largest internet market, have been violated by a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property”. The company says it has evidence that other firms have been similarly targeted. China says its laws must be respected internally and externally but otherwise its official response has been muted. Cynical commentators suspect Google is thinking twice about its commercial involvement in China where it has had difficulty establishing market share and achieving profitability. The company currently has about 30 per cent of the 384 million users, compared to the Chinese firm Baidu’s 60 per cent. Others say such a reductive view overlooks the bigger ethical issues at stake, both commercially and politically. On that scale Google’s decisions are more praiseworthy.
The difficulty of containing the issue commercially was immediately illustrated by the official US response. It was quickly taken up by the State Department and is now to be made the subject of a diplomatic demarche to Beijing. Human rights questions loom large in the US-China relationship under the Obama administration. But they have been carefully orchestrated within a much wider geopolitical setting to take account of China’s rapid emergence towards superpowerdom and its assumption of a bigger role in international affairs.
These priorities were fully on view two months ago during President Obama’s Beijing visit. His implicit invitation to China’s leaders that they should become part of a new condominium of world power with the US has left them very much in two minds. They insist China is still fundamentally a developing state, notwithstanding its remarkable economic and social progress. It must therefore be allowed scope to develop in its own sovereign way. But the very foundation of its success in the emerging international division of labour – and hence its growing worldwide influence – draws it towards more responsible participation.
Google’s decisions should encourage not only its executives but many others to re-examine the appropriate balance between economic access to the Chinese market and human rights there. This is not an issue only for companies and governments, but for civil society the world over. It has been empowered – indeed largely created – by the internet in recent years. Human rights are thereby made more universal.