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Bouquets of flowers lies upon the company logo as a man takes a photograph outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing on January 14, 2010. (Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images)
Google announced last week that they will no longer censor the results of their China-based search engine Google.cn. Google says it is willing to shutdown Google.cn and pull out of China if they cannot reach an agreement with the regime for an unfiltered search engine.
In the meantime, Google is making available certain sensitive, previously filtered information to its users in China. Undoubtedly, their actions pose a direct challenge to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Web censorship.
The CCP has set up the world’s most elaborate blockade to prevent Web sites it doesn’t like from being visited by Chinese users. Further, search engine results are filtered on certain search words, the results of which the regime does not want the Chinese people to see.
The CCP always censors in the name of filtering pornographic content. But a variety of evidence indicates that pornography is just a convenient pretext used to exclude viewpoints and truths that are embarrassing to the regime.
As early as September 2000 in an interview with CBS journalist Mike Wallace, when asked about why some Web sites, such as the BBC and the Washington Post, have been blocked from Chinese Web users, the then paramount leader Jiang Zemin’s answer was, "The Internet sometimes has dangerous contents, especially online pornography that will hurt our young generation." This answer obviously made no sense.
During the 2008 Olympic Games, the well-known British Web site “Telegraph" (www.telegraph.co.uk ) published a commentary, “BBC banned but pornography for sale in Olympic Village (Jul. 28, 2008),” which exposed the fact that politically sensitive sites, including those about Tibet and Taiwan, were still being blocked in the Olympic village, where there was available a wide assortment of "soft" pornography.
Finally, after The Epoch Times published the "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party," Web sites with the Nine Commentaries have had a 90 percent chance of being blocked by the CCP while a pornographic site’s chance of being blocked in China is only less than 10 percent, based on research from the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The CCP’s Web censorship and forcibly shutting down Web servers under the guise of anti-pornography are all part of the CCP’s policy to prevent the Chinese people from getting to know liberty and democracy. Removing sensitive, mostly political information from the sight of Chinese Web users is considered vital to the survival of the Party.
The challenge posed by Google has immediately become the headlines of Western major media; the CCP is more than being embarrassed. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement calling for an explanation from the CCP on Google’s allegations of an attack on its corporate infrastructure, intellectual property theft, and accessing human rights advocates Gmail accounts, both within China and outside China.
“The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy,” Clinton said.
President Obama also expressed support of Web freedom in China after he had discussions with Google. The U.S. Congress expressed serious concerns regarding the Google disclosures at a hearing last week.
For the CCP to make any concessions in this situation is almost impossible, because doing so will not only trigger other overseas Internet companies to take similar actions, but also lead to the undoing of China’s expensive firewall—an electronic "Berlin Wall."
The Party is trying to conceal the limitations on free speech in China. The cooperation from Yahoo, Microsoft, and other IT companies has made such limitations less apparent. The moral aspect of this issue has been forgotten due to business and financial interests.
The stand Google has taken challenges the moral position of those other IT companies. Google’s revelation of the intolerable censorship that China imposes on Internet companies has also attracted the world's major media to focus on the seriousness of the CCP’s Web filtering.
There are companies like China’s home-grown search engine Baidu, which allegedly took a large monetary payment in exchange for filtering out negative news reports regarding the Sanlu milk powder scandal. While Sanlu denies the accusation, one could see ten of thousands of news results on Google for the tainted milk scandal whereas Baidu had only dozens. According to even the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, Baidu advertises to its important clients that it will "delete negative news, improve the brand's reputation, and lead the mass opinion in a positive way," as Baidu's value-added services. (Nov. 19,2008, People Daily Web site, http://ip.people.com.cn/GB/136674/136700/8365928.html)
In other countries the company would have suffered the consequences once the public believed the charges had merit. But in China, Baidu can still compete with Google and take the majority of the market share. No matter how Google adapted its business strategy to fit into the China market, the fact that it is foreign-based made it distrusted by the CCP.
Google needs to understand what Chinese people need is an unfiltered search engine. For Google, the best thing to do would be to release the list of sensitive words and filter policies the CCP bullied it to enforce.
The Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) has developed a mature technology that is helping millions of Chinese to penetrate the Internet blockade, but is limited in what it can do by lack of resources. The next best step for Google would be to cooperate with GIFC to utilize the latter’s technical edge, while providing its own considerable financial resources, to tear down the CCP’s Great Firewall.
