IP Democracy: Must-Read: NYT Magazine on the Internet in China

Writer Clive Thompson has a lengthy article in the upcoming New York Times’ Sunday magazine about the Internet in China, which uses as its central focus Google’s decision to launch a censored, Chinese version of its search engine.

The article presents a far more nuanced view of how the Chinese people feel about the government’s policies than is typically presented in Western journalism, arguing in essence that Western critics of the government’s censorship policies are far more upset about the situation than are the Chinese people. The article also takes a kinder view of Google’s decision to block content than is usually expressed.

While Thompson spent time with Google’s point-man in China, Kai-Fu Lee, only co-founder Sergey Brin was authorized to discuss Google’s position on censorship. What Brin told Thompson was that Google’s decision to accede to government demands was truly motivated by a desire to provide information to the Chinese people, and that Google doesn’t expect to make a profit in China for some time to come.

What eventually drove Google into China was a carrot and a stick. Baidu was the stick: by 2005, it had thoroughly whomped its competition, amassing nearly half of the Chinese search market, while Google’s market share remained stuck at 27 percent. The carrot was Google’s halcyon concept of itself, the belief that merely by improving access to information in an authoritarian country, it would be doing good. Certainly, the company’s officials figured, it could do better than the local Chinese firms, which acquiesce to the censorship regime with a shrug. Sure, Google would have to censor the most politically sensitive Web sites — religious groups, democracy groups, memorials of the Tiananmen Square massacre — along with p*rn*graphy. But that was only a tiny percentage of what Chinese users search for on Google. Google could still improve Chinese citizens’ ability to learn about AIDS, environmental problems, avian flu, world markets. Revenue, Brin told me, wasn’t a big part of the equation. He said he thought it would be years before Google would make much if any profit in China. In fact, he argued, going into China “wasn’t as much a business decision as a decision about getting people information. And we decided in the end that we should make this compromise.”

Yahoo, on the other hand, is painted with a very black hat indeed. One high-profile Chinese blogger working outside of China called the company a “sellout” and said the Chinese people “hate” Yahoo.

I expected Zhao [Zhao Zing, a blogger shut down by MSN] to be much angrier with the American Internet companies than he was. He was surprisingly philosophical. He ranked the companies in order of ethics, ticking them off with his fingers. Google, he said, was at the top of the pile. It was genuinely improving the quality of Chinese information and trying to do its best within a bad system. Microsoft came next; Zhao was obviously unhappy with its decision, but he said that it had produced such an easy-to-use blogging tool that, on balance, Microsoft was helping Chinese people to speak publicly. Yahoo came last, and Zhao had nothing but venom for the company.

“Google has struck a compromise,” he said, and compromises are sometimes necessary. Yahoo’s behavior, he added, put it in a different category: “Yahoo is a sellout. Chinese people hate Yahoo.” The difference, Zhao said, was that Yahoo had put individual dissidents in serious danger and done so apparently without thinking much about the human damage. (Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment.) Google, by contrast, had avoided introducing any service that could get someone jailed. It was censoring information, but Zhao considered that a sin of omission, rather than of commission.

Despite all this drama, Thompson makes the case that the Chinese people are accustomed to the government censorship and take a much more philosophical view of the situation.

But perhaps the distorted universe is less of a problem in China, because — as many Chinese citizens told me — the Chinese people long ago learned to read past the distortions of Communist propaganda and media control. Guo Liang, the professor at the Chinese social sciences academy, told me about one revealing encounter. “These guys at Harvard did a study of the Chinese Internet,” Guo said. “I talked to them and asked, ‘What were your results?’ They said, ‘We think the Chinese government tries to control the Internet.’ I just laughed. I said, ‘We know that!’ ” Google’s filtering of its results was not controversial for Guo because it was nothing new.

Thompson points out, however, that the Chinese people may simply be “cowed” by the government, trained like cattle to simply accept the limitations.

They may be right about their users’ behavior. But you could just as easily argue that their users are incurious because they’re cowed. Who would openly search for illegal content in a public Internet cafe — or even at home, since the government requires that every person with personal Internet access register his name and phone number with the government for tracking purposes? It is also possible that the government’s crackdown on the Internet could become more intense if the country’s huge population of poor farmers begins agitating online. The government is reasonably tolerant of well-educated professionals online. But the farmers, upset about corrupt local officials, are serious activists, and they pose a real threat to Beijing; they staged 70,000 demonstrations in 2004, many of which the government violently suppressed.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on April 20, 2006 7:28 AM to IP Democracy