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China steps up defense of Internet controls
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A man walks past a logo of Google China in front of its headquarters in Beijing, January 22, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Jason Lee
BEIJING |
BEIJING (Reuters) - China widened its attack against U.S. criticisms of Internet censorship on Monday, raising the stakes in a dispute that has put Google in the middle of a political quarrel between the two global powers.
China has defended its curbs on the Internet nearly two weeks after the world's biggest search engine provider, Google Inc., threatened to shut down its Chinese Google.cn site after a severe hacking attack from within China.
The dispute could narrow room for Beijing and Washington to back down quietly and focus on other disputes such as trade, currency, human rights and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
"The more this case takes on high-level political import for the Chinese government, the more likely it is to stick to its guns," said David Wolf, president of Wolf Group Asia, an advisory firm covering Chinese media and telecommunications.
"The Chinese government can't be seen as backing down on such a fundamental issue," said Wolf.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week urged China and other authoritarian nations to pull down Internet censorship, prompting scathing commentary in Chinese papers.
The White House backed Google, while China accuses Washington of using the Internet for its own aims.
"This year, we're seeing problems over trade, the Dalai Lama, and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan coming to the surface," said Jin Canrong, an international relations expert at Renmin University.
"The politicization and ideological turn of the Google case could make it more difficult to work together. The basic need for cooperation, economically and diplomatically, hasn't changed, but each of these issues could disrupt cooperation from day to day."
In coming months, U.S. President Barack Obama may meet the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled Buddhist leader who Beijing considers a separatist. Washington has also unveiled arms sales to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing regards as a renegade province.
In Riyadh, the CEO of Cisco Systems Inc, John Chambers, told reporters he was optimistic that Google's dispute in China would be resolved through "give and take.
Chinese Human Rights Defenders said its website and four other activist sites were hit by denial of service attacks on Jan 23-24. It called the Chinese government the most likely culprit.
DEFENSE
China's State Council Information Office said the nation "bans using the Internet to subvert state power and wreck national unity, to incite ethnic hatred and division, to promote cults and to distribute content that is pornographic, salacious, violent or terrorist."
"China has an ample legal basis for punishing such harmful content, and there is no room for doubting this. This is completely different from so-called restriction of Internet freedom," an unnamed spokesperson said in comments issued on the central government's website (www.gov.cn).
Although the comments made no direct mention of Google or Clinton, the State Council Information Office is the cabinet arm of China's propaganda apparatus, steered by the Communist Party, and is one of several agencies behind Internet policy.
China's Education Ministry published a notice on Monday reminding schools they should be monitoring and filtering web content, as well as teaching "Internet morality."
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology rejected suggestions the government was behind the sophisticated hacker attacks described by Google.
China has jailed dissidents and Tibetan activists who used the Internet to challenge Communist Party policies and one-party rule. Prominent dissident, Liu Xiaobo, was jailed for 11 years in December on charges of "inciting subversion," largely through essays he published on overseas Internet sites.
The Communist Party mouthpiece, the People's Daily, on Sunday said United States used social media like Twitter and YouTube, to foment Iran unrest. Both are blocked in China.
On Monday, the paper called Washington hypocritical, noting U.S. laws restrict images and words that can be seen by children.
"This 'Internet freedom' that is being promoted everywhere is nothing more than a foreign policy tool, a fantasy of freedom," said a commentary in the paper.
Google said it will negotiate for an unfiltered search engine, but firms in sensitive sectors like the Internet or media find politics are never far from the negotiating table.
"Google may look back and see it pursued an ill-advised course by bringing in the U.S. government in such high-profile way," said Wolf, the industry consultant.
(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing and Souhail Karam in Riyadh; Editing by Bill Tarrant)
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is that what you are saying?
some mainland reader posted saying (s)he resented the state denying them their second child, but when they were older they thought it was a good idea – less competition among fewer kids.
it is one for the state to call for volunteer birth control with incentives, etc, for the sake of orderly economic development; it is quite another to practise forced late-term abortion under a “search and destroy” order. can life be taken away for “fewer competition”?
mainland chinese brought up under atheism and marxist materialism do not consider notions such as the sanctity of life. everything is a cost and benefit analysis. this is much worse than plain capitalism. even adam smith stressed the importance of moral imperatives. according to marx and mao, humans are nothing mroe than a heap of atoms and molecules, and the state has the authority to rearrange the quantum states and molecular structure of that heap of matter. and what is forced abortion but a rearrangement of certain atoms and molecules?
americans don’t laugh at lone lines. they laugh at the solcialistic mode of production and distribution that resulted in long lines. americans line up for buses at greyhound stations. many chinese do not line up at the train station, so last spring a university grad in china about to go home for the spring festival was pushed by crowds onto the rail and was killed by an oncoming train. most chinese remember that incident. so, before blurting out a wrong stereotype, better check the facts by asking around if you do nothing else.
in japan, they often line up in a funny way. at a roadside stop they don’t appear to line up, but everyone remembers the order in which everyone else arrives at the stop, and when a bus comes, the first one to arrive boards, followed by the second person to arrive, etc, etc. in a more crowded central station, ordinary lining up is customary. so, careful observation is required when making cross cultural comparisons.
americans have observed the chinese people for more than a century. mainland chinese have observed americans for less than 30 years. granted that americans are “easier” to understand, the attitude of many mainlanders are overly optimistic about their power to discern. cockiness is the word. i am a chinese living in china. i think that kind of attitude is eventually counterproductive. in china, except the vested interest class, and some disgruntled souls whose only mental nourishment is ultranationalism camouflaging as patriotism, this kind of cockiness does not sit well with ordinary people.
for the mainlanders living overseas, i suggest they pay more attention to what is sometimes called the “enclosure movement”, now a rage in china. in more common terms it is called “land grabbing”. usage rights on rural land is about to be legalized for sale or transfer, and so rural land prices are shooting up (previously such land cannot be transfered and so commanded a low or zero market price). now robber-baron gov’t officials are forcing farmers esp minorities to sell their land at “american indian” prices to them, and they then find some rich hk land developers to turn the land into tourism spots. this is now going on all over china. i first heard about that occurring in the suburbs of beijing last year, and last week i heard from a retiring friend living in shangri-la in yunnan province the same story. the gov’t officials have even delayed the promulgation of the land transfer law in order to buy time for the robber barons to grab more land before the law comes into effect. this, however, is mostly blocked on the internet. patriots take note.
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