The United States and Google separately said they would move against Chinese internet censorship, possibly signalling the start of a harder line toward China by US President Barack Obama and the end of Google’s business in the country.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to help citizens in other countries, including China, get uncensored access to the internet, and last week she met top executives from companies including Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Cisco Systems, an aide said on Tuesday.
Google, the world’s top search engine, separately said it might pull out of China, closing down its Chinese-language google.cn website and shutting its offices, because of censorship and after a series of sophisticated China-based cyber attacks on human rights activists using its Gmail service around the world.
Relationships between two of the world’s biggest economies have been strained recently over climate change, trade and other matters. China is the largest lender to the United States, holding about $800-billion in Treasury bills.
“It is setting us up for a clash, and it’s interesting to see who backs down. It’s the US versus China, but the companies will be lobbying. The technology sectors are intimately intertwined,” said Chris McNally, a China analyst at East-West Centre in Hawaii.
Companies moving into China, which has the largest number of internet users in the world, have been criticised frequently for ignoring human rights, while Beijing recently has accused Google of being a funnel for pornography.
“This is a clash of behemoths. This is a big country and this is a big company. The problem for Google, of course, is that if they say, ‘We are going to pull out of China,’ China could very well turn around and say, ‘Good, we have a billion people who want to take your place,'” said former US Department of Justice computer crimes chief Mark Rasch.
China’s policy of filtering and restricting access to websites has been a frequent source of tension with the United States and tech companies like Google and Yahoo!
Shares of Google dipped 1,3% although an executive described China as “immaterial” to its finances. It was not clear if the US search company and the US government coordinated their moves.
“Google was in contact with us prior to the announcement. Every nation has an obligation, regardless of the origin of malicious cyber activities, to keep its part of the network secure. That includes China,” said US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley.
Obama, during a visit to China in November, told an online town hall that he was “a big supporter of non-censorship”.
“I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged,” he said.
Eurasia Group said US-China relations were the top risk of 2010. “We’ll see significant deterioration in US-Chinese relations in the coming year,” it said, citing economic, security and cyber-security pressures.
Google attacked
Analyst and China internet expert Rebecca MacKinnon of the George Soros’ Open Society Institute said that Google was saying “enough is enough”.
“If anybody is in the lead, it’s Google and not the State Department, in terms of knowing what they’re doing and having something to say,” she said.
China would get the message, she added: “How exactly they are going to react to this, I cannot anticipate, but it’s likely that it will not be pretty,” she said.
About 20 other companies also were attacked by unknown assailants based in China, said Google.
“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered — combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web — have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement posted on the company’s blog.
A Google spokesperson said the company was still investigating the attack and would not say whether Google believed Chinese authorities were involved.
“This is a complete 180 turnaround [for Google],” said RBC Capital Markets analyst Stephen Ju. “Just about every earnings call recently has been that they are focused on the long-term growth opportunities for China and that they are committed.”
US moves for ‘internet freedom’
Clinton will unveil a tech policy initiative on “internet freedom” on January 21, aide Alec Ross said in an interview with Reuters.
“If you think about internet freedom from the Caucasus to China to Iran to Cuba and elsewhere, people do not have universal access to an uncensored internet,” Ross said.
“Our policies on internet freedom in part are a response to the fact there are countries around the world that systematically stifle their citizens’ access to information.”
Google said it was working with the US government over the security breaches. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt was a major campaign backer of President Barack Obama, and Schmidt was one of the executives meeting with Clinton.
China recently accused Google of allowing the spread of pornography on its search engine, which is second to local search provider Baidu in that market. – Reuters