Corporate Quislings
China is cracking down further on online expression. New regulations for news websites introduced on Sunday widen restrictions that were already harsh. News websites must be “directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests” according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
The Chinese government has been remarkably successful at monitoring, censoring and controlling the internet. An anti-free speech campaign that combines repressive technology and a willingness to make examples out of people has proven effective.
They couldn’t have done it on their own, and in fact, they haven’t. Western corporations have been happy to help. Microsoft’s Chinese web portal does not allow its users to search for “democracy”, “freedom” or “human rights”. Google agreed to remove “subversive” news from its Chinese news search engine. I read one report that said that searching for certain terms on Google China causes the search engine to stop working for several minutes.
Even worse is the case of Yahoo! and Shi Tao. A journalist who worked for a daily publication called Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News), Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison after Yahoo! helped the Chinese authorities identify him as the source of an email that communicated “state secrets abroad”. The email contained the text of a warning sent to his newspaper by the Chinese authorities not to publish anything related to the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Yahoo! had this explanation for why it helped condemn a journalist to the notoriously brutal Chinese prison system: “Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.”
Legal, of course, is not the same thing as moral. This is the problem with corporations. By their very nature they are amoral.
They are also disloyal, something we ought to remember as we deregulate. Yahoo! is an American company, but it has no loyalty to the American right to freedom of speech. Money talks, even if it means sending innocents to a gulag. I’m reminded of the willingness of companies to provide Nazi Germany with whatever it needed for the Holocaust. That, after all, was perfectly legal too, according to the “laws, regulations and customs of the country”.
It’s not just web companies that deserve a closer look. Corporations are falling over themselves trying to gain access to the Chinese market. The Chinese government has played this out very cleverly. When they started to open up China’s markets a couple of decades ago, the standard Western thinking was that if the Chinese people had more freedom to make money, they’d have more political freedom too. After all, aren’t capitalism and democracy supposed to go hand-in-hand?
So companies were encouraged to do business in China. But the current situation in China makes it clear that capitalism has nothing to do with democracy. In fact, the corporations who were supposed to help bring freedom to the Chinese people are helping the Chinese government keep it from them.
I think the Chinese government might be even more clever than this. They are threatened by democracy, but when they look at our democracies, they feel reassured.
They see that people in the West care less and less about participating in the governing of their societies and that voter turnout here is declining. They see that people in the West are disillusioned about their democracies and increasingly have no voice, that media and government are more and more corporate, that power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.
What’s good for the Canada goose is good for the Chinese gander. Rome gave the Romans bread and circuses to keep them quiet, Beijing gives the Chinese Big Macs and Hollywood.
But we do have options. Canada should pass laws that require that companies that operate in Canada adhere to ethical standards internationally. If Canadian individuals can be prosecuted for having sex with minors in East Asia – perhaps even according to the “customs of the country” they happen to be in – then Canadian companies, or Canadian subsidiaries, can be held responsible for helping throw dissidents into gulags.
Vidkun Quisling, Minister President of Norway during WWII, cooperated with the Nazis and handed over Norway to them when they invaded. His name has since become synonymous with traitor. He was later executed for high treason. I wonder what fate lies ahead for the corporate quislings of the 21st century.