Good (news) Friday: Microsoft vows to leave China to save its soul…

Last year, I wrote an article, here, entitled For some, doing business in China means leaving your conscience at the border, in which I lamented the trend of multinational corporations ignoring all regard for universal human rights just to get a piece of the Chinese economic pie. In fact, here’s how I began that article:

Some companies doing business in China have committed what Pope Benedict XVI condemns as the sin of moral relativism sin proceeds from the conscious decision to make money off a political economy that thrives on human rights abuses – of every kind imaginable.

And, since that article focused on Microsoft, I felt compelled to condemn Yahoo, here, in one entitled …Yahoo! Becomes China’s most favored national thought police, and Google, here, in another entitled Google adopts the Bush Administration’s motto of moral relativism after they followed Microsoft’s compromised path to China.

But the good news is that Microsoft’s suppressed conscience has caused it such unbearable headaches that, in a dramatic plea for corporate redemption, it has professed its intent to stop doing business not only in China but also “in all non-democratic countries”.

And, as one who blogs in solidarity with Chinese bloggers, I was especially gratified that Fred Tipson, Microsoft’s senior policy counsel, explained his company’s conversion to the BBC yesterday, in part, as follows:

Things are getting bad…and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there….We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.

Now, if only Yahoo, Google and other companies would agree to follow the moral high ground Microsoft proposes to take out of China, that would be good not only for Chinese citizens but also for international business.

NOTE: Anna Nicole Smith has dominated news in The Bahamas for the past 2 months the way Madonna has dominated news in the US for the past 2 weeks. Click here to see why the birth of Anna Nicole’s child has caused an escalating political row in the nation of my birth, and how I think the matter should be put to rest, now!

Microsoft, doing business in China