Googling the Great Firewall

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Googling the Great Firewall

Google Kowtowed to Communist Censorship

Newspaper editorial

By: Erping Zhang

Date: January 31, 2006

Source: Zhang, Erping. "Googling the Great Firewall: Google Kowtowed to Communist Censorship." The New York Sun. (January 31, 2006).

About the Author: In 2005, Erping Zhang, a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, was the executive director of the Association for Asian Research, a private group that seeks to increase U.S. public awareness of Asian issues.

INTRODUCTION

This essay was published a few days after the Internet search-engine company Google opened a search service inside China, google.cn, on January 27, 2006. The new service blocked access of Internet users in China to content that the government of China considers objectionable, including pornography, pro-democracy material, the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and material favorable to the religious movement Falun Gong, which the Chinese government considers subversive and has repressed. The author, Erping Zhang, was one of many persons who have criticized Google and other Internet companies, such as Yahoo and Microsoft, for collaborating with the Chinese government's censorship.

Most Internet traffic leaves and enters China through three major fiber-optic bundles. Each of these large underground data pipelines encounters a large computer or "router" before interfacing with China's internal communications network. The router scans content before allowing it to enter or leave the country and blocks content that the government deems objectionable. This system is sometimes referred to as the Great Firewall of China.

Prior to January 2006, Google searches performed inside China produced a message that left the country, caused Google-owned computers in countries such as the United States to perform a search, and imported the results back through the Great Firewall—if the Firewall would let them through. If results were blocked by the Firewall, the user would receive an error message and might be denied Google access for several minutes as a penalty. Because of these inconveniences, a Chinese search company called Baidu had captured almost fifty percent of the Chinese Internet search market by 2005, while Google had only twenty-seven percent. Globally, Google has over fifty percent of the Internet search market. Google had also been directly penalized for returning results for forbidden sites: in 2002, the Chinese Government blocked Google entirely for two weeks.

Google decided to compromise. Since the Chinese government would not supply a list of officially banned sites, Google set up a computer that systematically attempted to access millions of Web sites and noted which ones were censored by the Chinese government. These sites are now pre-censored by the google.cn search engine inside China. When a Chinese user's Google search produces hits to forbidden sites, the user will receive a notice saying that this has occurred. In Germany and France, attempts to access pro-Nazi websites produce a similar notice of blocked content.

PRIMARY SOURCE

"Focus on the user and all else will follow." This is principle number one listed on Google's Web site of "Ten Things Google Has Found to be True."

This principle holds great irony upon release of announcements that Google has agreed to comply with Chinese government censors in launching its new site www.google.cn, catering to Internet users inside China. With this in mind, it would seem more appropriate for the principle to read: "Focus on the user, unless the user happens to be Chinese, in which case the government is more important than the user."

If the user is Chinese, allowing listings of Web sites regarding human rights, religious freedom, and Chinese government abuses of religious freedom may perhaps expose the user to information the government considers "threatening."

Google's acceptance of Chinese government censorship comes as an even greater disappointment in light of its recent vigor in resisting subpoenas from the United States Department of Justice. The Department of Justice subpoenas came as a part of U.S. efforts to enforce the Child Online Protection Act, which Congress passed in attempts to combat Internet child pornography.

Google's efforts to defend the right to privacy of United States citizens might seem more genuine were the company not so ready and willing to facilitate the Chinese government's denial to its own citizens of freedom of the press, freedom of religion and rights to free expression. In this instance, it appears that Google lawyers will go to bat to defend the right to privacy of Americans doing searches for child pornography, but they deem it less important to defend the rights of Chinese citizens to learn more about religious freedom and democracy.

Recent studies from the OpenNet Initiative show that while Chinese Internet filters block about 7% of the top 100 search results for pornography, more than 70% of the top 100 results were blocked in searches on the Falun Gong movement, outlawed in China in 1999. More than 80% were blocked in searches for the China Democracy Party. Now searches on www.google.cn will yield similar results.

An ongoing experiment, the first of its kind, initiated by Reebok, demonstrates that companies can push local limits in China and still make money. In 2002, despite regulations that outlaw free trade unions, executives at Reebok decided to make association rights a priority at their factories in China by instituting a process for factory-wide elections at sites of their largest contracting plants.

Reebok executives claim they undertook tense negotiations to ensure that rank-and-file workers would have their say and that the elections would offer workers representation. Of course, the Reebok union, like every other union in China, still falls under the umbrella of the All China Federation of Trade Unions, however, impartial observers report that conditions have improved since its installation.

The experiment is far from perfect, but it never would have started had Reebok not taken a stand. Likewise, Google could have countered Beijing's censorship with tenacity equal to its ongoing efforts to resist compliance with subpoenas from the Department of Justice.

Google has said that it complies with regulations in China in the same way that it complies with regulations elsewhere. Has its board of ethics considered that laws and regulations and rule of law operate on a different plane in China than in most other countries?

In America, a lengthy process exists. It includes checks and balances on government agencies, which must seek thorough approval to demonstrate their lawful right to demand companies turn over any sort of corporate records. Additional processes guarantee the rights of defendants to fight such subpoenas in court.

In China, the process is quite different. It relies not upon legitimate rule of law, but upon a priority to preserve the power of the Communist Party. The top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party writes a list of the topics it deems threatening to its complete control over political and social capital within the country. It hands that list to Google executives, who proceed to build their China search engines with filters installed. Chinese Internet users log on and search for information on Falun Gong and they receive results of sites for Chinese propaganda of an "evil cult." They receive no information regarding the imprisonment of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in Chinese reeducation through labor camps.

Perhaps Google may argue, at least they logged on, at least there is a search engine, and some Chinese users may learn ways to evade the censors. Those who evade the censors may then contribute to the ongoing efforts of the Chinese people to push for greater governmental accountability and for greater individual rights. It is unfortunate, though, that they will be forced to fight the technology of a giant like Google in order to get around the limitations that the search engines have succumbed to.

It is unfortunate that through their compliance, companies like Yahoo, MSN, and now Google have implied that the Chinese Communist Party has legitimate rights to enforce such limitations.

SIGNIFICANCE

Several Internet companies have helped implement Chinese censorship policies. In December 2004, Microsoft corporation agreed to delete from its servers political blogs by a writer named Zhao Jing. Remarkably, the postings were stored on computers in the United States, not in China. U.S. computer maker Cisco has been criticized for manufacturing the computers that implement the Great Firewall. E-mail and Internet search provider Yahoo, which has been doing business inside China since 1999, has been widely criticized for its behavior. In 2004, it was revealed that Yahoo had handed over e-mail account information for a dissident named Shi Tao who had sent to foreign Web sites copies of a government order that Chinese reporters not discuss the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy uprising. Shi Tao was tracked down with the help of the digital evidence supplied by Yahoo, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in jail.

The co-founder of Yahoo, Jerry Yang, defended his company's actions by saying that "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law." Critics argued that Yahoo was not obliged to do business in China at all, except by its desire to compete for market share and increased profits. In 2006, it was reported that in 2003 Yahoo had also supplied evidence crucial to jailing Chinese dissident Li Zhi, who had criticized government corruption online and tried to join the outlawed China Democracy Party. The nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders has argued dozens of such cases have probably gone unreported.

The Committee on International Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings entitled "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Repression?" on February 15, 2006. Representatives from Google, whose informal corporate slogan is "Don't Be Evil," were accused of hypocrisy. Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA) told a Google representative that the built-in censorship of google.cn "makes you a functionary of the Chinese government … So if this Congress wanted to learn how to censor, we'd go to you."

In the 1990s, the Internet was widely hailed as a powerful force for democratization, one that governments would not be able to control. This turned out to be incorrect; a number of countries, including China, censor Internet traffic. China employs 30,000 full-time Internet police who use software tools to monitor Internet users.

Google's relationship to the U.S. government was also headline news in 2005, with the difference that it was Google non-cooperativenes, rather than its cooperativeness, that was newsworthy. Google refused a request from the Justice Department to hand over lists of one million search queries submitted during a one-week period and a random sample of one million Web addresses reachable through Google. The Justice Department said it wanted the information in order to determine how often U.S. Internet users search for child pornography and did not ask for identifying information on which individual users had made the searches. Google denied that it was refusing the request on privacy-protection grounds, but refused to explain what its grounds actually were; some industry observers speculated that Google was afraid trade secrets would be revealed. Google does reportedly record personal identifying information on all Google Internet searches.

Groups such as the American Civil Libertarian Union criticized the Justice Department's request for information without specific need as a precedent that might eventually lead to the use of Google (and similar databases) for the improper surveillance of Internet users. In March 2006, a Federal judge ruled that Google would have to give the Justice Department 50,000 randomly selected Web addresses and 5,000 search queries. Google said it would comply with the order.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Chase, Michael and James Mulvenon. You've Got Dissent!: Chinese Dissident Use of the Internet and Beijing's Counter-strategies. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 2002.

China and the Internet: The Politics of the Digital Leap Forward, edited by Christopher Hughes and Gudrun Wacker. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.