Would it have made a difference if the Chinese had subpoenaed anyone else, such as a Chinese company?

I assuming by your nick, I was going to get lampooned whatever.

The way I see it is simple, if China is that bad then put them under a trade embargo. The entire rest of the world should stop doing business with them. Why make it the responsibility of corporate company to make moral judgement on governments. Yahoo complied with a legal subpoena in China. That was a reasonable thing to do.

You should think about the legal requests that Yahoo, Google and every other company routinely comply with in America in the context of the Guantanamo bay facility and the PATRIOT act. Are those companies doing the world a service?

I know it easy, and apparently trendy, to throw stones at Yahoo over this but frankly that's a very simplistic and naive attitude.

I've met both the Yahoo founders and spent a fair amount of time with one of them. They are nice guys, they have done some awesome things for "human rights" while I've been at Yahoo, like their anti-Prop 8 contributions.

I'm not saying that every decision that a large corporation makes is good for society, fair, or even moral. But, I do think it's ridiculous to make companies moral arbiters when dealing off-shore.

And frankly, part of the point of my original post is everyone's hypocrisy. I would bet a $100 that everyone, without exception that has commented on this thread has at one time or another bought something from China (or elsewhere in the 3rd world) that was made by people treated inhumanely.

So even though you threw the first stone, I hope you think about if you can justify it.

My own opinions, not necessarily Yahoo!s position, etc, etc

That depends whether the instability brought by poking a corrupt regime is good or bad. On the one hand the human rights campaigners could improve democracy and help bring China into the modern world, whilst on the other hand promoting the faults of their corrupt regime could easily result in anarchy and martial law if there was ever an uprising. The major problem here is that an uprising would quickly cause the cost of production to go through the roof in China, forcing virtually every industry to pull out of the country and relocate elsewhere. This major export hit to the Chinese economy could collapse their entire system, and disregarding the international effects, it could easily land China in the situation of North Korea.

Honestly, with the fact that China could so easily result in a massive North Korea, how would that help the standard of living?

China isn't a simple situation and assigning childish ethics to the country will resolve nothing. The simple allowance of unions in China could easily result in another global recession. A college strike here in Ontario is threatening the provinces recovery as it may delay the graduation of all those getting retrained due to the financial crisis. Simply imagine what happened if unionization occurred throughout China and the ramifications for the countries trade.

China is going to require baby steps to bring it into a democratic and free world, anything faster could be an international economic disaster on the scale of the great depression.