Text 5355, 91 rader
Skriven 2007-11-14 13:57:38 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Yahoo not alone
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Yahoo has gotten bad publicity over its actions in China, but plenty of other
companies are helping the Chinese government keep their citizens under control
without negative PR.

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www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.yahoo14nov14,0,7320735.story
baltimoresun.com
Yahoo isn't the only villain

By Peter Navarro

November 14, 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 Mr. Shi's identity. Yahoo caved,
and Mr. Shi is doing 10 years in a Chinese slammer for one click of his
subversive mouse.

For ratting out Mr. Shi, Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang was 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 varied
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 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 the University of California, Irvine
and the author of "Coming China Wars." This article originally appeared in the
Los Angeles Times.

Copyright + 2007, The Baltimore Sun

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