Stance by China to Limit Google Is Risk by Beijing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- In the US there are millions of so-called "illegals" who can't call the police if assaulted or abused for fear of deportation. This is a major human rights issue... if it happened in another country we'd call it apartheid.
- In the US there is extensive corruption. Consider Rod Blagojevich's blunder but realize that one doesn't do that sort of thing unless it's part of the status quo.
- The treatment of prison inmates in the US is atrocious. Being incarcerated is a near guarantee of regular rape and assault at the hands of other inmates. Guards do not stop this behavior. This is worse than any gulag.
edit: I love the US but I think it's fair to point out some of is flaws. I'm shocked that this comment gets modded down, are there a lot of Pat Buchanan acolytes on HN?
After all, the US Government censors information about the Kennedy assassination for no good reason... it's utterly hypocritical for any Amnerican to criticize the Chinese government without first criticizing the US government for censoring the Kennedy stuff and for trying to shut down WikiLeaks.
edit: I can't believe how many social conservatives appear to be downvoting this. Do you really have a problem with 17.5 year olds having consensual sex?
This is a business decision. Try posting a video of a naked 17.5 year old person on youtube and see how long it takes before it is taken down. Try posting a video slide show of sensitive wikileaks docs and see how long the video stays up.
Your argument also falls apart in terms of the humanitarian argument. Search increases freedom and thus is helpful to humanitarian goals. If Google makes a decision that results in less search, the decision results in less freedom.
Similarly, if you are running late to an event and you drive 100 MPH on the highway and you get pulled over for speeding, you might actually get there later than if you'd just driven the speed limit. If you want to optimize within the law you don't speed. Google is doing the equivalent of going 100 MPH and then blaming the cop.
The Sophisticate: "The world isn't black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else."
The Zetet: "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view..."
-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling
We saw it manifested in yesterday's post - the one who believed that odds of two to the power of seven hundred and fifty millon to one, against, meant "there was still a chance". All probabilities, to him, were simply "uncertain" and that meant he was licensed to ignore them if he pleased.
If you care about censorship, you are not licensed to ignore censorship in the US just because both are gray. If you care about humanitarian abuses, you are not licensed to ignore them in the US just because China may commit worse ones.
You are however "licensed" to focus more on China, on the grounds that their abuses are orders of magnitude worse.
Google could also decide to only partially censor google.cn, perhaps removing the Tienanmen square stuff but leaving in some of the Falun Dafa links.
That Google makes big, bold moves in China and yet does NOTHING about the US... it could even host SOME wikileaks content... suggests hypocrisy or at least a business focus rather than a humanitarian one.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Google acts bold in the one market in the world where it is losing... allowing it to leave gracefully. I'm half tempted to write some sort of wikileaks mirror on app engine and see how long it stays up.
My hypotheses would be:
- you do not like China's regime and so any anti-china propaganda is good.
- you feel that all US censorship laws are good, thus you have no issue whatsoever with the US approach to Wikileaks.
- You think that all governments censor a little, but only the ones that censor a lot are bad.
You are mostly incorrect in your hypotheses:
- While I indeed do not like the Chinese regime I see lots of anti Chinese propaganda that I do not like.
- I do not like any censorship whatsoever, and thus any attempt by any government to censor to any extent is bad and should not be tolerated.
- Wikileaks deserves to be supported and is indeed a great service.
I am a non-American westerner that has lived in China for several years and have had personal experience with the censorship there and the way that nationalism and controlled information shapes and corrupts people's minds. It's awful. I take issue with your initial statement to try to draw equivalence between China and the US. It isn't equivalent at all and drawing any equivalence detracts from the horrible consequences that the Chinese regime has on its people and the world.
But if I had to choose which I think Americans should be more angry about... on one hand the US treatment of illegals and prisoners, and on the other hand the Chinese government. I'd say that Americans should definitely be far more concerned with the former.
What do you get when citizens of one regime care too much about citizens in another? Neoconservatism. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is occurring just at the time when the US is attempting to start a trade war with China (see the tariffs started by Obama and some of the fallacious and destructive rhetoric on China's currency spouted by Paul Krugman). How is this any different than the way Bush sold the Iraq/Afghan war -- he cited treatment of women and religious persecution and taliban censorship.
The ultimate result of all this is that war with China will be far more likely. The US propaganda approach to sell war starts with feeling sorry for "them" because of their "backward" social customs, with a focus on the impact upon women... then moves to indignation, then a call to action / call to war.
Consider how many Americans believe strongly that going to war in Iraq and killing MILLIONS is a humanitarian improvement over Saddam's rule. Before that we killed millions of children via sanctions. Talk about shaping and corrupting people's minds.
It's always easier to see the corruption and shaping of minds from across an ocean, but that doesn't mean we're not all very corrupted and misguided here. I think our primary responsibility is at home... let's leave the neocon warmongering to someone else and act where we have clout, not just join a big hurrah anti-China bandwagon.
However I am more concerned with what is happening with the US than China even given the mismatch in scale and extent of the Chinese condition. The US has a far wider impact on the world as a whole than China.
This doesn't really change my argument: from an objective standpoint China is a much nastier place than the USA for freedoms and human rights.
I think it's important to question that statement. Consider that we learned in the past few years that the US has been routinely practicing "rendition" for decades... in other words, putting someone on a plane and flying them to a jurisdiction without any human rights protections, and doing all sorts of highly illegal, human rights violating things to them.
Also, the US has an interest in convincing the world (especially its own citizens) that it occupies the moral high ground. This is part of the American story. Americans will not tolerate wars that are about territory or resources, but we seem to have an infinite tolerance for wars that are about "good vs evil". Thus the moral high ground is the first step in any warmaking propaganda.
In an absolute sense, with routine rapes in prisons, rendition, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and gitmo, etc., I seriously challenge your assertion that China is "much nastier".
Ironically, the reason China practices censorship is to limit the chances of widespread social uprising. People in the US tend to idealize the idea of revolution so much that our through process is "well of course they should have a revolution, then they'd all have freedom just like us". In reality, widespread social uprising in China would likely mean millions of people dead or starving and no chance of a gradual transition.
The reason China cracks down as hard as it does is b/c there are fault lines in its society that might crack and result in social uprisings and lots of people dying.
It is in the US's interest to try to poke at these and provoke them, to prevent China from proceeding gently into the modern age. This is why Obama feels comfortable starting a trade war that will lead to many in China starving, and why Paul Krugman forgets all about economics and calls for massive tariffs. Neither of these men care if people in China die as a result of their actions, and both will be the first to criticize China for its occasional crackdowns rather than praise it for its massive undertaking of nonviolent societal transformation into the modern age.
China's big problem is that as it liberalizes its economy there are some areas that have become very rich while others have remained very poor. If a social uprising along class lines were to emerge, it would destroy China. Unlike the US, China does not have geography conducive to domestic transit, thus its coastal areas are inevitably going to be far wealthier than its inland ones.
Is it unreasonable for China to try to stop social uprising movements? No more unreasonable than for the US to try to stop them. But to consider what is an equivalent movement, one must appreciate what a delicate balance China has undertaken.
In light of this, the sheer irresponsibility of Obama and Krugman comes to light. Google too is guilty of this, though I don't hold a company to the same standard.