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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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down all of YouTube because of four videos that have offended the king. Do you make the
choice of taking YouTube down and showing nothing? Or do you talk to the government,
negotiate and eventually take down the four videos so that YouTube can be broadcast
again? That is the kind of question we face every day, and it is the kind of question that I
think we all should be thinking about.
Doing business in China:
upfront on compromises
Peter Scheer
Executive Director, California First Amendment Coalition
A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the
United States to become the biggest Internet market in the world. At 225 million users,
and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s Internet is a business opportunity so grand
and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises
that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.
I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices
of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing Internet search results for
searches performed inside China - within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship,
as it is called - with the same searches performed from locations outside China (and
therefore outside the firewall). The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable
candor at least, that they could not risk being observed submitting to Google and Yahoo
search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong.”
Mind you, these were American-trained litigators, the kind of lawyers who barely flinch in
the face of a grand jury subpoena, and who spend their careers pushing back against the
demands of government authorities. While usually immune to intimidation, they
nonetheless feared the repercussions to themselves, their firms, and their clients from the
mere act of typing a few search terms into an Internet-connected computer. So seductive
are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even
hardened litigators into wimps.
In conversations with Internet entrepreneurs and investors active in China, one often
hears arguments that are more rationalization than logic. An Internet CEO recently told
me that freedom of speech is a “relative” value that, despite its appeal in Western
democracies, is not appropriate to China. Popular variations on this theme are that
freedom of speech is not an affordable luxury in a country that must be single-minded in
its pursuit of economic development; that the people of China are more interested in
consumer goods than personal and political freedom; and that Westerners’ pressure on
China to be more tolerant of dissent is a form of cultural imperialism.