Sebastian Mallaby: Google and My Red Flag

Washington Post op-ed columnist and author Sebastian Mallaby has had a Chinese publisher express interest in a book he wrote on the World Bank, provided that certain passages are deleted. His first reaction was to say "Forget it." And then he started looking at what Google managed to do when China demanded concessions...

I think he makes some good points:

...Google's answer to the China dilemma is better, and more subtle, than that of other Internet firms. It does not simply assert that engagement with China is always good. It recognizes the arms race between China's repressive state power and China's liberating economic growth, and it accepts the conclusion that follows: Some forms of engagement hasten liberal trends; others empower jailers.

This is not a distinction acknowledged by all investors in China, nor indeed in the China debate more generally. Policy types argue the merits of engagement vs. containment as though there were nothing in between; either you're for tough talk and sanctions, or you embrace the dragon unequivocally. Both Bill Clinton and George Bush have favored engagement, and both have waxed especially lyrical about the opening of cyberspace. Clinton once laughed that China's efforts to control the Internet were "like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." "Freedom's genie will be out of the bottle," Bush said of the Internet's arrival in the Middle Kingdom.

This, plainly, is exaggerated....

[snip]

But the problem with the Clinton-Bush rhetoric is not just that it's blithe. It helps American companies to pretend that all China engagement is positive. Thus the Internet router firm Cisco had no qualms about building a great cyberwall around China, which blocks Chinese surfers from "subversive" foreign Web sites. Thus Yahoo has obliged the Chinese government by tracing pro-democracy e-mails to one of its users. The e-mailer has been jailed, and Yahoo has effectively become a Chinese police auxiliary.

But Google hasn't done that. It is creating a search service in China, http://www.google.cn/ , but it is not erecting cyberwalls or helping to arrest people. The new Google search service will give Chinese users access to better information than they had before -- a clear gain for freedom. And although the search service will be censored, it's hard to see this as a net loss. The censored material would not have reached China without Google's investment.

And that's not the best bit. Google has negotiated the right to disclose, at the bottom of its Chinese search results, whether information has been withheld -- a disclosure that may prompt users to repeat their search using google.com instead of google.cn. Of course, the second search might be frustrated by Cisco's routers. But disclosing censorship is half the battle. If people know they are being brainwashed, then they are not being brainwashed...

Read the whole post.

In a related vein, Michael has One Boycott I Won't Be Joining over at Slobokan's Site O' Schtuff.