One useful spin-off from the developing story of Google’s difficulties with the Chinese communist regime is that it may finally spur the West to discard the rose-tinted spectacles through which it has chosen to view China in the past decade — and not before time.
The West’s response to China’s rapid industrialisation was determined by a recipe blending three parts greed with one part naivety. The greed was understandable: the stupendous rate of Chinese economic growth triggered a desperate desire for a slice of the action.
Everywhere, whether in companies or universities, one found a palpable determination to “get into China”. In the political world, we saw Western governments scramble to out-do one another in fawning upon visiting Chinese potentates.
Still, greed is part of human nature; we have to make a living, and often behave reprehensibly while doing so. What was less forgivable about the West’s approach was the implicit naivety. It was a product of wishful thinking brought about by market triumphalism, the belief that, in the end, it is impossible to have a capitalist economy without also having liberal political institutions.
Google’s engagement with China was driven by both greed and naivety. The latter was graphically illustrated by the deal on filtering search results the company accepted. The Google folk persuaded themselves it was better to let internet users know their searches had been filtered, on the grounds that this might alert Chinese citizens to the imperfections in their political arrangements. It was unpalatable, but better than nothing. And it might lead to change.
It was all hooey, of course. The regime is irredeemably authoritarian and never had any intention of ceding freedom of information to its people. Neither has it ever bought into the idea of market triumphalism. The whole Chinese economic “miracle” is a refutation of the link between capitalism and liberalism: Hu Jintao & Co believe it is perfectly possible to build a dynamic, prosperous economy without bothering with all that democracy nonsense.
Recent developments confirm the indifference of the regime to Western sensibilities. Though nobody has yet conclusively proved the hacking attack that triggered Google’s decision to quit China was officially sanctioned, I can’t find anyone in the security world who doubts it. And already some specialists have uncovered interesting similarities between it and the “Ghostnet” operation of 2008/9 mounted against Tibetan activists — which was traced back to a Chinese intelligence network.
James Fallows, the distinguished US journalist who has recently returned from a long posting in China, thinks it is entering its own “Bush-Cheney era” — a period of aggressive dismissal of the world. “A difficult and unpleasant stage of China-US and China-world relations lies ahead,” he writes. “This is so on the economic front [and] may prove so on the environmental front … It is increasingly so on the political-liberties front, as witness Vaclav Havel’s denunciation of the recent 11-year prison sentence for the man who is in many ways his Chinese counterpart, Liu Xiaobo.”
Which provides the context for the most remarkable development of the week — Hillary Clinton’s speech on internet freedom at the Newseum in Washington last Thursday. Internet users, she declared, must be “assured certain basic freedoms” — freedom of expression and of worship, freedom from want and from fear and, most intriguingly, “freedom to connect”.
She then turned to l’affaire Google. “We look to Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make this announcement. We also look for that investigation and its results to be transparent. The internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it’s great that so many people there are now online. But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.”
The regime was so enraged it issued an unprecedentedly speedy critique. Which shows how quickly the Google drama is evolving into a high-level crisis. Cyberspace was the next frontier; it’s becoming the next battleground. – guardian.co.uk