MB Civic

Yahoo isn’t the only villain (LAT)
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The Internet giant is just one of many tech firms propping up China’s totalitarian ways.
By Peter Navarro

Los Angeles Times
November 8, 2007

Which company has committed the greater
evil? Yahoo Inc. helped send a reporter to
prison by revealing his identity to the
Chinese government. Cisco Systems Inc.
helps send thousands of Chinese dissidents
to prison by selling sophisticated Internet
surveillance technology to China.

If bad press is to be the judge, the “stool
pigeon” Yahoo is clearly the bigger villain.
In 2004, after the Chinese government
ordered the country’s media not to report
on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square protests, journalist Shi Tao used his
Yahoo e-mail account to forward a
government memo to a pro-democracy
group. When China’s Internet police — a
force of 30,000 — uncovered this, it
pressured Yahoo to reveal Shi’s identity.
Yahoo caved quicker than you can say
Vichy France, and Shi is doing 10 years in a
Chinese slammer for one click of his
subversive mouse.

For ratting out Shi, Yahoo Chief Executive
Jerry Yang has been dragged before
Congress, called a “moral pygmy” and
forced to issue an apology. In contrast,
Cisco and Chief Executive John Chambers
have received little public scrutiny for
providing China’s cadres of Comrade
Orwells with the Internet surveillance
technology they need to cleanse the Net
of impure democratic thoughts.

Cisco is hardly alone in helping China keep
the jackboot to the neck of its people.
Skype, an EBay Inc. subsidiary, helps the
Chinese government monitor and censor
text messaging. Microsoft Corp. likewise is
a willing conscript in China’s Internet
policing army, as Bill Gates’ minions
regularly cleanse the Chinese blogosphere.
Google Inc.’s brainiacs, meanwhile, have
built a special Chinese version of their
powerful search engine to filter out things
as diverse as the BBC, freeing Tibet and
that four-letter word in China – democracy.

Business executives have justified their
actions with a “when in China, do as the
Chinese do” defense. To do business in
China, these executives insist, they must
comply with local laws. But China’s local
laws often force executives to make moral
and ethical choices that would be
intolerable in the West.

The broader problem is that American
business executives have little training in
how to deal with ethics in a corrupt and
totalitarian global business environment —
blame U.S. business schools for that. As a
result, moral horizons tend to be short,
and executives who find themselves in the
heat of a battle don’t know where to draw
the line, which is what happened to Yahoo.

Some executives also trot out the “constructive engagement” defense.
This too-clever-by-half idea is that
companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft,
Skype and Cisco are actually pro-
democracy elements because they are
helping build China’s Internet. Even though
these companies collaborate through self-censorship and assist with Internet
surveillance, the greater effect is to build
free speech — or so the argument goes.

What’s missing from the American
corporate perspective is this bigger
picture: The collaborative tools that U.S.
corporations provide to spy on, and silence,
the Chinese people are far more likely to
help prop up a totalitarian regime than
topple it.

With American corporate help, China
remains the world’s biggest prison. As
reported by the Laogai Research
Foundation, millions of dissidents languish
in Chinese-style gulags known as laogai,
and thanks in part to U.S. corporations,
their numbers are growing.

In addition, human rights abuses are both
systematic and endemic in China. From
Catholics and Muslims to the Falun Gong,
from pro-democracy voices and
investigative journalists to the Free Tibet
movement, the penalty for being caught
for banned religious or political expression
is arrest, beatings and sometimes death.

For all these reasons, it is ultimately
shortsighted to single out Yahoo for the
kind of behavior now common to many big
U.S. companies operating in China. That’s
why we need to have a much bigger
discussion about how to engage
economically and politically with China. It’s
also why the proposed Global Online
Freedom Act, which would make it unlawful
for U.S. companies to filter Internet search
results or turn over user information,
should not be viewed as a magic bullet but
rather as the start of that debate.

Peter Navarro is a business professor at UC
Irvine and the author of “Coming China
Wars.”