Two days later, in a postmodern twist to an already complicated situation, the International Federation of Journalists criticized China for censoring media coverage of Google’s withdrawal, and of a toxic vaccination scandal in Shanxi Province. The group noted that the Central Propaganda Department had stipulated that any information related to both stories be sourced only from the Xinhua news agency. The orders came just one day after the CPD had imposed a news blackout on the trial of four Rio Tinto employees charged with stealing commercial secrets and bribery. In this context, Google’s decision to leave, despite the lure of China’s huge internal markets, could not have come at a more embarrassing time. Now, Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest mining company, is almost certainly reassessing its own future within China.
Before the end of the week, the ripple effects of Google’s decision were already apparent in the US technology sector. Addressing the US Congressional committee, at a session entitled “Google and Internet Control in China: A Nexus between Human Rights and Trade”, Christine Jones, executive vice president of Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain registration company, said that new regulations which required anyone who wished to create a website to provide photographs and other personal identification that would be invaluable to state’s censors, had exerted a “chilling effect” on her company’s operations. Consequently Go Daddy has to stop selling new internet domains in China. News also broke that the chairman of the computer manufacturer Dell had assured the Indian prime minister of his company’s decision to move US$25 billion worth of business out of China to a “safer environment with a climate conducive to enterprise” in India.
As if this weren’t bad enough, the Chinese leadership also has to contend with the ongoing embarrassment of Dr Liu Xiaobo. Having written and published Charter 08, a human rights and reform manifesto that bears comparison with the American Declaration of Independence, Dr Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his subversive activities, on Christmas Day 2009. But instead of vanishing into political obscurity, as the government hoped, Liu has become more prominent behind bars. In January, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by a group which included Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, the Dalai Lama, a former Director of the World Trade Organization and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Their endorsement noted that “the concepts that Liu and his colleagues put down on paper in December 2008 are both universal and timeless. These ideals – respect for human rights and human dignity, and the responsibility of citizens to ensure that their governments respect those rights – represent humanity’s highest aspirations.” Two weeks ago, more than a hundred Chinese scholars and writers also called for Liu’s immediate and unconditional release.
Compounding the Politburo’s befuddlement, Dr Liu – who has been detained many times since first coming to official notice as one of the “Black Hands of Beijing” – accepted his sentence with an unsettling warning. “I believe that my work has been just,” he wrote, “and that someday China will be a free and democratic country . . . I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison. Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer.”
We live in a cynical age, always ready to believe that commercial interests trump other political considerations. There is plenty of evidence for this – the scuppering of the Copenhagen deal being just one recent example—but we should also pay close attention when there are exceptions to the rule. This week China has learned, at great cost, the vicissitudes of global capitalism. Rather than yield to the old-fashioned bullying of the world’s third largest economy, three large companies are looking to do business elsewhere. If others follow, the People’s Republic will find itself in a political quandary. Without sustained economic growth it faces internal challenges that would eclipse any of these embarrassments, but unless the government agrees to moderate its fanatical censorship, and share some of the power it has hoarded for so long, Google’s departure may set a trend that could have incalculable political and economic consequences.
Deng Xiaoping famously quipped that China’s flirtation with democracy and free markets should focus on results: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.” There is also a Chinese saying that warns that “It is better to be a dog who lives in a time of peace than a man who lives in a time of chaos.” In the year of the Tiger, as China’s political leaders ponder the wisdom of these sayings, they would do also do well to consider an American proverb that says you shouldn’t sell a bear skin before you have caught the bear.
