Google finds its own "Chinese medicine" hard to swallow -The iPINIONS Journal

Google won international praise last week for merely announcing that it intends “to review our business operations in China” after Chinese agents hacked into the Google email accounts of human-rights activists – who are deemed to be enemies of the state.

Meanwhile, far too few pundits are bothering to note that these hackers just did to Google what Google has done to others in China. For, as the price for entry into the lucrative Chinese market, Google followed the compromised path laid by Microsoft and Yahoo by agreeing to spy on the Internet activities of ordinary citizens on behalf of the Chinese government:

How odious and hypocritical that American corporations – after exploiting democratic freedoms to make their names and untold fortunes – are now collaborating with a totalitarian regime to deny people in the most populous country on earth similar democratic freedoms.

[Yahoo becomes China’s most-favored thought police, TIJ, September 12, 2005]

Google made a mockery of its motto: “Don’t Be Evil”… Was its corporate conscience, at long last, predicated upon a cost-benefit analysis for its own bottom line?

[Google adopts…motto of moral relativism, TIJ, January 26, 2006]

Of course, I welcome Google’s belated pang of corporate conscience. But the best I can do is damn it with faint praise. Because frankly, there’s no escaping the manifest hypocrisy in Google now complaining about the application of the Golden Rule after striking a Faustian bargain with China.

More importantly, though, Google’s dance with the Devil should serve as a warning to other multinational corporations hoping to exploit the Chinese market. It should also give pause to all foreign governments that are currying favor with China for financial gain and even hailing it as a worthy replacement for the US as the world’s only superpower.

Mind you, I’m no apologist for the United States. After all, my commentaries are replete with criticisms of its business-centric domestic policy and egocentric foreign policy, both of which persist even under the transformative presidency of Barack Obama.

But China’s totalitarian rule at home and the wholly mercenary ties it pursues abroad, which includes cuddling a genocidal maniac in Darfur, Sudan, compels me to offer this pithy admonition to those still banking on China:

Better the American Devil we know, than the Chinese Devil we don’t.

I am also acutely mindful that it’s one thing to vow to stop doing business in China, but quite another to actually stop – as Microsoft’s failure in this respect has demonstrated so poignantly:

Microsoft’s constrained 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.’

[Microsoft vows to leave China to save its soul, TIJ, November 3, 2006]

So hold your praise for Google, and stop holding your breath for Microsoft…