[Mb-civic] Google and My Red Flag - Sebastian Mallaby - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Google and My Red Flag

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, January 30, 2006; A17

I work in an industry that Google may half-destroy, but last week I 
sympathized with the gobbler of all ad revenue. Google was beaten up in 
the media for bowing to censorship in China, even though plenty of news 
organizations sell their wares in countries where they get censored. 
Meanwhile, the dilemma of censorship turned personal for me. A Chinese 
publisher expressed interest in my recent book on the World Bank -- 
provided that certain passages were deleted.

My first reaction was: Forget it. The test for such dilemmas is whether 
you'd mind being outed in public. If a media critic lambasted me for 
kowtowing to communist censors, I reckoned I'd feel lousy.

But my second reaction was different. I set the question of money aside: 
If I went through with the deal, I'd give the (small) advance to a human 
rights group. Having established that, what next? Was it better for 
Western books to circulate in China in censored form, or was it better 
not to circulate?

This seemed an imponderable question, so naturally I Googled it.

Google's answer to the China dilemma is better, and more subtle, than 
that of other Internet firms. It does not simply assert that engagement 
with China is always good. It recognizes the arms race between China's 
repressive state power and China's liberating economic growth, and it 
accepts the conclusion that follows: Some forms of engagement hasten 
liberal trends; others empower jailers.

This is not a distinction acknowledged by all investors in China, nor 
indeed in the China debate more generally. Policy types argue the merits 
of engagement vs. containment as though there were nothing in between; 
either you're for tough talk and sanctions, or you embrace the dragon 
unequivocally. Both Bill Clinton and George Bush have favored 
engagement, and both have waxed especially lyrical about the opening of 
cyberspace. Clinton once laughed that China's efforts to control the 
Internet were "like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." "Freedom's genie 
will be out of the bottle," Bush said of the Internet's arrival in the 
Middle Kingdom.

This, plainly, is exaggerated. The fact that China had (according to a 
2005 count) 4 million blogs is a good sign for Chinese expression, but 
not necessarily for freedom. China has the largest cyberpolice force in 
the world, which swoops down on bloggers who speak out against the 
government. When a democracy activist named Wang Youcai seized the 
occasion of Clinton's 1998 visit to China to launch an opposition party 
online, he was promptly arrested and jailed for six years. He "became 
Clinton's Jell-O, nailed to the wall," as Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu 
write in their forthcoming book on cyberspace.

But the problem with the Clinton-Bush rhetoric is not just that it's 
blithe. It helps American companies to pretend that all China engagement 
is positive. Thus the Internet router firm Cisco had no qualms about 
building a great cyberwall around China, which blocks Chinese surfers 
from "subversive" foreign Web sites. Thus Yahoo has obliged the Chinese 
government by tracing pro-democracy e-mails to one of its users. The 
e-mailer has been jailed, and Yahoo has effectively become a Chinese 
police auxiliary.

But Google hasn't done that. It is creating a search service in China, 
http://www.google.cn/ , but it is not erecting cyberwalls or helping to 
arrest people. The new Google search service will give Chinese users 
access to better information than they had before -- a clear gain for 
freedom. And although the search service will be censored, it's hard to 
see this as a net loss. The censored material would not have reached 
China without Google's investment.

And that's not the best bit. Google has negotiated the right to 
disclose, at the bottom of its Chinese search results, whether 
information has been withheld -- a disclosure that may prompt users to 
repeat their search using google.com instead of google.cn. Of course, 
the second search might be frustrated by Cisco's routers. But disclosing 
censorship is half the battle. If people know they are being 
brainwashed, then they are not being brainwashed.

Which brings me back to my dilemma. The simple pro-engagement stance 
would be to go ahead: Better that Western books reach China in 
compromised form than that they be shut out altogether. But if the 
censors remove my references to China's "prison labor," "dictatorial 
system" and so on, a Chinese reader will find only my admiring comments 
about the country's poverty-reducing growth -- and assume that this is 
the sum total of what foreigners see in their country. That is where the 
brainwashing begins, and I want no part of it.

And so, thanks to Google, I have come up with my answer. I'll accept the 
Chinese offer on three conditions: The translation should include a note 
warning the reader that it's been censored; the note should say which 
chapter has been changed; I'll give the proceeds to a human rights 
group. It feels good to have resolved that, but I don't really expect 
this deal to go through. The Chinese offer may mysteriously vanish now 
that I've written this column.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/29/AR2006012900708.html?nav=hcmodule
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