Google, do not take Chinese netizens hostage
english.people.com.cn
english.people.com.cn
The concept of societal "information bearing capacity" blows my mind. What a fascinating and bizarre rationalization. So inside that mindset, preventing access to information is a a public service!
This kind of BS derives from a more common theory: Chinese people don't deserve democracy because they are not well educated. It's stated on many official newspapers and comments. TFA is just a little elaboration. You can find even funnier nonsense everyday everywhere from Chinese politics news.
The CCP behavior is hilarious to watch, Internet users in China loving posting pre-1949 propaganda from CCP, something like Xinhua Daily says 'One-party rule is disastrous'.
Here's an example
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=1946%20%E6%96%B0%E5%8D%8E%E...
I think many of us expected popular support for the Communist regime to drop over time - but we're seeing the opposite, and that's gravely concerning.
But particularly for minorities in countries nationalism provides an easy way for self-identity. You'd want to be able to be proud of some specific fact about yourself and unfortunately nationality is a particularly easy way for minorities like the Chinese (in the US) to do this.
And so this easily leads to American raised Chinese to jump on board supporting their home country. The alternative is to admit that their special home country needs advice from the US. Perhaps they weren't properly (or weren't in the US long enough) brainwashed to accept democracy, but something is causing them to think that they understand the complex policies better than the rest of the developed world simply because they lived there once.
I also know a Chinese international student in Canada for college who insists that I am brainwashed by the west. I think that's a pretty bold statement since it pretty much implies that I was too stupid to distinguish the noise from the truths when I learn shit, since the fundamental difference between the democratic world and the communist world is that in the democratic world the truth is always there no matter how much shit is piled on top of it and in the communist world they just pile shit on your face and actively try to hold the truths out of reach.
I think with the silly gaffs like the little girl who was lip syncing at the olympics that the CCP is still tripping over itself on universally backwards policies, and that all this is not just a case of the west trying to assert its cultural differences onto China.
What's interesting is how agile the CCP has become. We call it 'communist' but it no longer resembles any of the Marxist ideals we usually associate with it. They react quickly and have been using capitalism/modernization/nation-building as a very effective carrot. This isn't the old stagnant hard-line Soviet communism by any measure.
I think perhaps the arrogance is from the Chinese side in not wanting to be told what to do, and not from the rest of the developed world. If they really do not want to learn and borrow from the developed world, they should stop pirating western films and music and stop stealing western technological advancements as well as rejecting developed political advancements like freedom of information that conveniently happens to weaken the grip of the CCP.
They clearly admit they are developing, then what other reason would they have to reject the advice of developed nations except to push away the specific advancements that could potentially disturb the balance of power.
The Chinese is stance is highly arrogant and hypocritical.
Wow, this isn't even good propaganda. I wrote better BS than this for class papers. More believable, anyway.
I guess I should detail a rebuttal. China engaged in an act of war (attack) on a private company, Grossly unethical should not go ignored, and certainly not cooperated with. If the people of China don't like the outcome, they should consider what their government is doing. If you shoot at me, don't be surprised if I stop coming by your house. Sorry if the other members of your household don't like it.
The problem with Chinese authorities through out history is, you don't look for troubles, but troubles look for you.
To combat terrorism after the "9/11" terrorist attack, the U.S. has permitted police to search civilian emails and even monitor their communications without permission
A related post in the side-links does opine on the attacks directly though: Google probes inside job in hackings.
At least the US had a freaking law about the action. The prc government on the other hand, plays trinity in market: rule maker, judge, and player.
There's a joke on twitter, the government rape you, then sue you for prostitution
Not on wire tapping, they made a law afterward though to forgive everyone.
The common response to this sort of story is to laugh and say how little they understood the power of a truly free press. And this is true for its part, but it is also true that there is goverment and now corporate propaganda mixed into the "reputable" news. Not of the same scale or variety, but it is there nonetheless.
They're all stenographers, from the hungriest PR flack to Woodward and Bernstein (they were spoonfed everything by the fucking FBI!).
There are two big questions:
1) What legitimizes a government to to define "national context" and the will of the people? Or simply, what legitimizes government?
2) If government is legitimate, what are the limits of its mandate where an individual's fundamental rights are concerned?
Western governments can claim to express the will of the people because it is the people who have elected them (directly or indirectly). The Chinese government's power is based on a military campaign many decades ago. It cannot claim to speak for the chinese people. The laws it makes are nothing but the the will of a clique of people with guns.
The second question is a very difficult one. Where do fundamental individual rights come from? Who defines them with any legitimacy? Does it have something to do with nature or psychology or are the relative to culture? I don't know, but I do know that I want to claim individual rights independently of any collective expression of opinion and power, and everyone else I know wants to do that as well.
If western governments run a system of censorship it may in many cases be a violation of fundamental individual rights. That doesn't change the fact that it may at the same time be a legitimate expression of the will of the people. It may be the will of the people to violate fundamental individual rights. That's the contradiction we in the west have to grapple with, and it's totally different from the problem the Chinese have with their clique of men with guns holding them hostage.
> Asking for permission
versus
> Asking for forgiveness rather than permission
With censorship you are prevented from obtaining information, with surveillance you (might) be punished for obtaining information afterwards. If the only reason for surveillance is to control actions (which is censorship), then do you define all law enforcement as censorship? We're kind of digressing, but my point was that it's ridiculous to assert that surveillance of US international calls is worse than not allowing your entire country to surf wikipedia...
So, I agree - Google definitely shouldn't take Chinese netizens or their data as hostages. That's the job of the Chinese government.
This also illustrates how Google's earlier actions (doing business in China in hopes of encouraging the nation to 'open up') have had the opposite effect: Google has handed China a highly effective bargaining chip in the form of their customers' data. If Google had never offered these services in the first place, it would be impossible for their customers to be 'held hostage' by the Chinese government.
To some extent this situation is different for Microsoft - Ballmer was somewhat correct to say in recent discussion that his company has no reason to withdraw from China. The Chinese government has no easy way to hold his customers' data hostage - once you've installed Windows and Microsoft Word onto your PC, it's going to keep working and letting you access your data unless you do something to change that (like connecting to the internet or installing Green Dam), regardless of any disagreement Microsoft may have with your local government. It is only Google's heavy reliance on 'the cloud' for storing users' data that makes this possible.
So the People's Daily is accusing a US corporation of being a tool of the US government.
Don't I fucking wish.
Every other US company has been able to survive except whiny little Google: "Boo hoo, they stole my IP"! Tell that to GE, who are doing just fine in China, thank you very much, IP or no IP.
Google should grow some *alls, stand and fight, or gracefully admit defeat instead of whining.
I did find one point interesting though, and I'm assuming you're a young, internet-savvy Chinese guy:
> "Every other US company has been able to survive except whiny little Google"
Does this include the myriad of US websites that have been blatantly ripped off by Chinese domestic companies? I'm assuming you're a user of Xiaonei (an almost verbatim clone of Facebook, including UI and page design, even color scheme) - can you defend the blatantly unoriginal, downright thieving tactics of Chinese tech companies when it comes to "competing" with their American counterparts? Perhaps this Chinese "outclassing" of yours is simply because many Chinese companies never put in the resources to develop anything of their own, preferring to steal and pilfer instead.
Perhaps Google is leaving because, as every other nation (not only the West) knows, the Chinese as a whole have fundamentally no respect for hard work. As a Chinese I am ashamed to admit this, but the truth deserves to be told regardless of how it reflects on my people: Chinese culture has no respect for the work of others, and ripping off is so normal that one hardly bats an eyelash. Whatever Google does in China will merely be copied verbatim, there's almost no point in staying in a market where all of your hard work counts for just about nothing, and there's no rule of law to protect this work from unscrupulous thieves.
[edit] Also, the only reason GE is "doing fine" is because nobody's yet figured out how to clone entire power plants. Look at companies like Apple, who originally had to import iPhone screens from Germany to avoid having the designs stolen and sold to the highest bidder by merely manufacturing it in China. This is embarrassing and shameful to me as a Chinese - we are rightfully known as a nation that cannot be trusted, cannot be respectful of what is rightfully someone else's. We are known globally as a nation of unscrupulous people who will throw away all semblance of civility and justice to succeed - I am ashamed to be associated with this, but yet it does reflect our business culture very accurately.
Instead of constantly looking at every move like a threat against China, and instead of looking at everyone like an enemy, perhaps China's greatest enemy is itself: we are overly aggressive, we always seek to win by someone else's destruction, and we seem incapable of forming transactions where one side doesn't get screwed. We are not team players, and this is going to be a very severe limitation on the advancement of China as a whole until we culturally un-fuck ourselves. Drop the constant victim complex - not everyone is out to get you.
Going from 0% market share to >30% in a couple of years is losing. Google was gaining. They had their most profitable quarter in China this last quarter.
If by outclassed you mean being the best search engine for finding pirated software and music, I guess you have a point.
But yeah, keep spinning it :)