In case you haven’t been following the war of words between Google and China, here’s a quick rundown: About two weeks ago, Google threatened it would cease operations in China due to the belief that a certain someone, maybe the Chinese Communist Party, had been hacking into the accounts of human rights activists. The Chinese government gave a tepid response, claiming Google was just sour because it wasn’t doing so hot next to the country’s native competitor, Baidu. Chinese citizens responded with disappointment, claiming Google’s exit would slow the development of the Internet market and be a detriment to the fight against state censorship. The saddest and most cynical even left wreaths at Google’s Chinese headquarters.
When the news of Google’s potential exit broke, it wasn’t Google execs Eric Schmidt or Sergey Brin who spoke to the public. Rather, it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who gave a statement advocating the United States’ commitment to free access to the Internet abroad, claiming it to be a new foreign policy priority.
But what was really going on here? Was Google just acting like a spoilt child, kicking the bully in the shin and running behind its parents? Or was it spearheading a state and market movement to increase civil liberties against a totalitarian goliath?
For decades, companies have bowed and bent to the awe of the Chinese market, accepting harsh and uncompetitive rules to tap into the most populous country in the world. Like adolescent chubby-chasers at a fat camp dance, they’d do anything to get a piece of that sweet, sweet . . . uh, market.
But times are changing. Younger bureaucrats have become more nationalistic and skeptical, causing foreign businesses to question the pros and cons of operating there.
China isn’t playing by the rules economically or politically, so perhaps some severe market pressure will pave the way for political freedoms. The playbook dictates that as the economy grows, so does civil society, and when civil society grows, people begin to demand an increasing say in the activities of the nation-state. China will have a harder time suppressing dissidence as the spread of information becomes harder to contain.
But they’re still trying. According to a Jan. 25 article in The Wall Street Journal, China’s state-run media released an onslaught of rhetorical attacks on U.S. Internet policy after news of Clinton’s statements proved difficult to contain on the Web. Google was called a pawn in the U.S. ‘ideology war’ while the White House was criticized for using Internet freedom as an excuse to infringe on other countries’ domestic affairs. A columnist for the CCP’s main newspaper, China Daily, even went as far as to call U.S. Web policy hypocritical and blame it for inciting violence in the recently disputed Iranian election.
Low blow, homes. This ish just got real.’
Whatever the accusations, the one message we can take away from the Google-China battle is that the actions of multinational corporations are not matters that should be solely left to the market. This incident is one of many that prove the inextricability of nation and corporation.
‘The role of business,’ a Jan. 25 People’s Daily editorial claimed, ‘has been hijacked by political purposes.’ It sounds grandiose and accusatory, but really it’s just fact. While I was cooking dinner with my liberal Phish-loving hippie roommate last week, he ranted about the new Supreme Court ruling that allows companies and unions to contribute unlimited funds to political campaigns. The United Citizens vs. Federal Election Commission decision overturns decades of work set by campaign finance reformers to limit the amount of money corporations can spend on political campaigns.
‘It’s ridiculous, man,’ he said, chopping up some onions. ‘Companies have more rights than people!’
‘Yeah,’ I responded apathetically. ‘It’s totally messed up.’
I kept saut’eacute;ing the chicken while the blade of his knife came down on the chopping board more and more loudly.
In retrospect, my apathy seemed to stem from the fact that I had already internalized the logic of the court’s decision. The argument seemed rather redundant at this point: Of course corporations have more rights than people; they have more money. From one side, the Supreme Court decision represents a deeply sad turning point in American politics. But from the other, it almost seems like a logical progression of capitalism.
To consider politics and money as separate spheres does little to help us understand the game. At this point, they’re pretty inextricable. The goal of one is shared by the other, and in most cases, that goal is profit, whether to bolster a campaign or buy a new boat.
‘ So I can see the point the Chinese are trying to make. We Yanks get boners’ when we talk about freedoms ‘- free speech, free market, free bird. We spread liberal philosophy on the heads of the oppressed like holy water, yet when our words are tested, our actions are flimsy.
‘ But the pockets of a few are always fat. Perhaps we bought into Reagan’s trickle-down economics. Perhaps we all believed that sooner or later, we’d get our piece of the pie. In either case, to say politics has ‘hijacked’ big business hardly seems apt. Neither party was accosted ‘- it was consensual. And we were watching through the glory hole.
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