Search Baidu for "Tiananmen square massacre" - guess how many results?
baidu.com
baidu.com
Companies that have had shoddy products coming out of China are companies that don't pay attention to their supply chain -- and Apple is fanatical about supply chain management.
Furthermore, the ethical problem of manufacturing in China isn't the same as that of practicing censorship in China. If tomorrow Western companies got out of China, besides unleashing an economic apocalypse that would make the last two years look like a rainy picnic, China wouldn't suddenly turn into Sweden. It would turn into Cuba, or North Korea. An angrier, more nuclear-armed North Korea. Nobody would win in this scenario, least of all the Chinese citizens we all want to eventually live in a prosperous, democratic country.
Manufacturing in China is the norm, not the exception.
If everything that was made in China would disappear from the Western hemisphere society would collapse.
There are many other places to get goods manufactured, and the free market is extremely good at sorting out problems like this.
And the biggest reason for outsourcing labor is for reducing the costs involved ... that's why I don't get why aren't they working on more advanced industrial robots and why is Japan the only one having breakthroughs in this regard ... probably because of unions, but what's worse ... outsourcing work or fully automated factories in your own country (that creates more jobs for engineers)? IMHO, it's the former.
And please note that with this statement I'm probably shooting myself in the foot ... since working on outsourced projects is at times my only source of income :)
I think there is a popular misconception that most companies prefer China simple because they are cheap and you can easily replace them with x country which also has cheap labor.
There are several advantage of doing business in China besides cheap (skilled) labor. They have better infrastructure than most third world country with cheap labor I can think of. I don't know much about eastern Europe and what it bring to the table besides cheap labor. But from my experience I can tell you India (or any south-east asian country) is not an alternative to the manufacturing goods produced in China.
There is some kind of international trade pact (no reference handy at the moment) that forces most western nations to divide imports of manufactured goods from third world countries. If this was not the case - I have little doubt that most western countries would have relied on China, even more than it already does. Perhaps exclusively.
That's probably true, but this is a chicken&egg problem, isn't it ... if the westerners would outsource to India / Eastern Europe ... with economic growth their infrastructure will be better and better.
And cheap labor is the primary reason ... you take that away and I don't think anything else will matter. Because of its economic growth, costs in China will rise, it's only a matter of time.
Just to take Apple's example (they also rely on other asian countries for certain parts, ie. Korea & Taiwan comes to my mind right now), if they were to not rely on China to assemble/manufacture their products Apple products would have been even more expensive.
Also your iphone being defective has nothing to do with the fact that they were manufactured in China. While China made goods tends to be of low quality. High end computer gadgets like apple/dell goes through a certain high standard of manufacturing than your typical Chinese stuff. Companies tends to have a more hands-on approach to maintaining a certain standard and quality, which is generally missing in other chinese made products.
The problem is not that apple / google / MSFT invests and does business in China. The problem is that our government have legitimized Chinese style of government (a unique variant of communism), regardless how much they criticize on the side. Our government does not confront Chinese government directly. Its already too late to do anything now - we are too connected with their economy. If they go down - we go down, if we go down - they go down too.
The government can't do anything or the companies can't do anything without shooting their own leg. The only way we could pressure Chinese government is to start some kind of mass movement where we refuse to buy products manufactured in China (or similar government with questionable human-right records).
Its easier said than done, but the change has to come from us.
Why? Do you have any other historical examples of consumers from one country pressuring another country to reform its government through boycott?
And why China? China has a significantly more organized and helpful government than most countries in the region (say, the ones in which most of your clothes are made, or where some of the raw materials for those gadgets are mined).
But most importantly, why do you feel the need, as an American consumer, to act on the relationship between China and its citizens?
I don't know of any example but do you really need a precedence to follow for everything or can you not take extraordinary steps to counter extraordinary circumstances?
>And why China? China has a significantly more organized and helpful government than most countries in the region (say, the ones in which most of your clothes are made, or where some of the raw materials for those gadgets are mined).
The subject of this thread is China's human-rights record. More on next question.
>But most importantly, why do you feel the need, as an American consumer, to act on the relationship between China and its citizens?
You can't have double standard in reference to human rights. You (government, not you as in _you_) can't cry foul about communism and human rights record and use it as a reason to sanction some countries and even use it as (one of the) reasons to go to war at the same time blissfully do business with China. As far as human rights go, China is one of the worst offenders out there, and by human-rights I don't only mean not being able to search the internet unrestricted. If you say something against the government or try to start a movement, they will hunt you down and kill you. You can't even talk about those killings they will hunt you down and kill you. You don't hear about it much because they do a very good job of keeping things tight - do some digging around and you will see what I am talking about. You can start from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
If any other country did what China does, there would have been massive sanctions if not war. But of course, no one wants to fight with a nuclear-powered military strong nation.
Wow, calling for war with China, really? Did you support the war in Iraq for the same reasons? Do you also support war with Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Pakistan?
because the overwhelming majority of consumer goods i buy are from apple.
I think China has a bad enough reputation that advertising that it's not made in china won't be like shooting yourself in the leg. Although I also agree that it is vastly the governments (and thus our) faults for Initially legitimizing the government (or maybe nixon's fault). Unfortunately government action would be too strong an attack, and so would a massive boycott. so that's why a slow public opinion change, like my opinion, that actually makes it advantageous for companies to not make their crap in China.
If apple stopped making stuff in China, I might just upgrade more often. Now multiply that times every apple fanboy/girl and it's apple no longer has to shoot it's own foot.
Here is a Baidu search in chinese for "Tiananmen Square protests": http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%C1%F9%CB%C4%CA%C2%BC%FE It says "31 hits" (but it's actually 23)
And here is a Baidu search for "Tiananmen Square": http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%CC%EC%B0%B2%E9T%8FV%88%F6 - 7.7 million hits.
You can translate keywords easily by using the wikipedia interlanguage links, which is what I did.
I bet that every single one of those 23 hits was tweaked and tuned to make the event sound like an irrelevant, small event in chinese history.
I mean we care because most of us have cushy jobs, or have already made it in a developed country, so we have time to think about philosphy and politics. But honestly it's no big deal, because their censorship is a meaningless effort. When I went to china no one had false understanding of the living conditions in china comapred to the USA, and most people were enjoying what they had to care.
With the Internet, telephone, mail, it really becomes impossible to censor. It's just a facade to make the government feel like it's in control.
Edit:
I realise this has been pointed out before, but I find it curious that "google.blogspot.com" gets you banned, but "Tiananmen square massacre" doesn't.
My guess is that searching from within China and in Chinese would yield different results. Maybe someone on the other side of the great firewall could run a test ? On second thoughts, maybe better not...
Although I agree the language of the search term might have an effect. If anyone can try this in Chinese I'd be interested in the result.
But they might show different results or even less of them.
Contrasted with the > 1,000,000 results on google.com
And curiously, google.cn gives ~42,000 results - and they still say they are censoring (据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。 = According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown.)
Simply reconfigure apache on a world-wide basis to allow it to proxy requests for search results.
The 'great firewall' would presumably have a bit of an issue with filtering out all the websites on the planet running apache.
But maybe more practical to provide an easy-to-install package that allows an apache installation to provide a proxy service in a standard way. Probably with a configurable bandwidth limit. Not sure how people would discover them though...
Simply go to some site and type ?q=hello+there after the domain and get your google results.
So the proxy would also need to convert URLs in the returned pages to link to proxied URLs, and to provide a proxy service for these 'undesirable' URLs.
If content filtering is used, then it would also need to strip out 'undesirable' words to prevent the whole page from being blocked based on its content rather than its URL.
I suppose a central service could be provided to provide all the proxy servers with the uptodate list of URLs that need proxying, and words that must be removed.
All this seems to me to be very possible, although it's probably a little more than you were thinking.
That's probably true.
But I can't see how a single government entity would be able to withstand the collective smarts of the population on both sides of that link cooperating to defeat it.
They would either have to shut down the link or stop censoring at some point.
However, possibly fear of reprisals from the government if found doing it may put off many people.
I might spend some time putting together something that can easily be installed in apache that does this.
I'm fairly sure that if they blocked all forms and all results pages with more than 10 links on them that the internet would cease to be an asset to China.
Censorship is a delicate thing, censor too little and it is useless, censor too much and you might wake the dragon.
I never said they were stupid, and I'm aware of the credentials of the parties colluding with the Chinese government in this respect.
One of the "search results" would probably not appear on your screen... but in some sort of government database of "suspected dissidents." A government-run search engine is a must for any totalitarian regime.
This has been discussed a few days ago on HN.
http://image.baidu.com/i?tn=baiduimage&ct=201326592&...
Edit: Searching for 王維林 returns results, if useless ones. http://image.baidu.com/i?tn=baiduimage&ct=201326592&...
Testing this from outside China.
Here I tried in the english version of the same page. Got blocked: http://search.news.cn/language/search.jspa?id=en&t=1&...