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Talking tough on censorship

Hillary Clinton's speech on internet freedom was welcome. But don't pretend China and the US have shared values

Jonathan Fenby, guardian.co.uk  Saturday 23 January 2010 19.00 GMT

For a western audience, Hillary Clinton's speech about internet freedom and the need to counter hacking was entirely welcome. For China, it amounted to "information imperialism".

For the west, the fact that access to sensitive links from websites in China is blocked on official orders is unacceptable, leading Google to say this week that it will disregard such controls and thus risk having its Chinese language site closed down. For Beijing, there is no censorship in China, which has an "open" internet system.

For the United States, hacking of the kind reported into Google's system with the copying of Gmail messages to unknown addresses is a major infringement on a private domain operation which puts users (including dissidents) at risk. For those authorities in the People's Republic, the ability to monitor dissidents electronically is more than welcome, while commentators linked Google to the White House, presumably as part of what Li Changchun, the Politburo Standing Committee member responsible for media, calls "hostile forces" seeking to infiltrate "decadent thought" into the People's Republic through the internet.

The gulf between the two sides is enormous, built on different value systems and different political regimes. Whatever the faults of the American way, it has a basic belief in freedom of information. In China, on the other hand, control of information is an essential element in the power structure. For Li, as for remnant Maoists in the 1980s, what used to be called "spiritual pollution" is not only a threat to the facade of puritanical Communist Party rule harking back to the Spartan days in their wartime base (even if it is hugely belied by the extent of corruption by Party officials); it also threatens one of the levers of authority.

There is, thus, no way in which China is going to accommodate Google. But, as I suggested in a Cif posting earlier this week, the row has ramifications that reach far beyond this particular case. Clinton's speech ups the ante considerably. On the day that Obama told the bankers "if these folks want a fight, it's a fight I'm ready to have", the secretary of state appears to be sending much the same message to Beijing.

If this is the case, it is heartening that somebody as highly placed as Clinton is setting out lines of engagement on the issue of free speech, particularly amid a renewed crackdown on dissidents on the mainland. As I argued in a CiF contribution at the end of last year, the west has not got very far in its dealings with a more assertive, self-confident China, as was evident during Obama's visit to Shanghai and Beijing in November and at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The Treasury in Washington believed that a softly-softly approach on the currency issue would induce Beijing to raise the value of the yuan, but has achieved nothing at all.

There are, of course, very evident difficulties in taking a tougher line. Most other US tech companies operating in China have distanced themselves from Google. The contribution of cheap mainland production to their bottom line in hard times is not something American companies that have set up plants in the People's Republic want to lose. Nobody has anything to gain from war or a trans-Pacific slanging match that gets out of hand. The G2 concept may be a mirage but China and America have to find ways of working together; one of the big disappointments of the Obama administration to date has been its lack of creativity in seeking to do so.

More . . .

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