Last year President Barack Obama visited China, urging the Chinese government to change its policies towards information freedom and censorship. It didn’t seem to work — Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are still blocked.
A few weeks ago, Google announced that it had plans for a complete withdrawal from the Chinese Internet search market due to the firewall the Chinese government puts on Internet browsers.
For example, when a surfer in China tries to look up “Tiananmen Square 1989,” the Internet connection is reset. For a first-hand experience of how bad Internet censorship is, you can either bring your laptop to China or you can download a program called ChinaChannel, a plug-in for Firefox.
“What China is striving to prevent on the Internet is the flow of information that would pose a danger to national security and the interests of the society and the public,” said Qin Gang, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said at a press conference on March 23.
There is no doubt that if Chinese citizens were given an information bank and a quicker means of communication, Chinese citizens would start becoming more concerned about their “oppression.” At least that’s how some Americans seem to view the situation.
It makes for a more compelling news story if we say that Chinese Internet censorship is keeping every Chinese citizen from unearthing ugly truths about their government.
“It’s not like people are there wanting to research human rights violations and Taiwan independence,” said Andrew Lih, a professor at University of Southern California, according to CNET, an online tech news service. “Probably 98 percent of what they’re searching for is not going to be blocked.”
So why does Obama feel the need to intervene?
You may say that Obama is using his belief in universal human rights as his guiding light. If that’s the case, why doesn’t he focus more efforts on, say, Sudanese massacres instead of trying to get everyone in Beijing on Facebook?
What this really looks like is an effort by Obama to help out Google in the Chinese marketplace, except it’s being framed as a human rights issue as evidenced by his speeches regarding the issue. But why would Obama want to do this?
Because Google carries a lot of weight in Washington.
Last May, Obama appointed Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s head of global public policy, to deputy chief technology officer. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, is on the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Katie Stanton is a former Google employee who is now the director of citizen participation in the White House, and Sonal Shah is the former head of global development at Google.org and now runs the Office of Social Innovation for Obama.
Also, Google employees gave the third-most money to the Obama campaign in 2008, behind Microsoft and Goldman Sachs.
But I mean who really cares about all that? I just want to see some of the funny stuff 1.3 billion Chinese people would put on YouTube.
Reach Cullen at cmwheatl@asu.edu
