Business At The Price Of Freedom 254
An anonymous reader writes "The TechZone has an article on how much technology companies setting up shops in China have to kowtow to the Chinese government. All the major search engines have given in to Chinese demands to throttle liberty in exchange for access to the Chinese market and Microsoft has blocked users of its MSN site from using the terms 'freedom,' 'democracy' and other concepts China has designated as dangerous. From the article: 'Most disconcerting are recent reports that Yahoo!'s Hong Kong operation is turning over emails which helped convict a reporter. Journalist Shi Tao was jailed and sentenced to 10 years in prison for "illegally sending state secrets abroad." The secrets that he revealed were information his newspaper received from the state propaganda department about how they could cover the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was identified because he had used Yahoo!'s free email service for which Yahoo! turned over log files to authorities that were later tracked back to his computer.'"
Re:Boycott Yahoo! (Score:2, Interesting)
In other words, if it's legal to have seven year old kids sewing shoes for your company to sell, locked in a basement with no ventilation or breaks - that's fine. If it's required that you turn over documents and inform on every employee you have and report the gay employees and non-(insert religion here) employees for government extermination - fine. If it means keeping tabs on office romances so that adulterers (women only of course) can be stoned to death, then so be it! It's just the cost of doing business and who are we to judge whether stoning a woman to death for cheating or executing non-believers or putting toddlers to work in a sweatshop is wrong?! It's called moral and ethical relativism and it rules the day now. Right or wrong only applies in the context of what others say is right or wrong in your specific part of the world and that's that.
But don't take my word for it. Just search for past comments from people on slashdot related to the Yahoo! incident in China.
What About Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who are we kidding. Private companies will gladly sell out and kowtow to anyone as long as it helps them rake in the cash. Companies don't care if China never becomes a democracy, in fact they probably prefer it the way things are.
Personally, I feel the Chinese model is so attractive to business that pretty soon people in western nations will begin to lose their rights as companies demand more and more harmonisation with the superior Chinese model.
It seems capitalism can achieve what the soviets could not.
Re: does SLAVERY ring a bell? (Score:2, Interesting)
slavery was a business. did you know that? have you heard of it? it was a major cashcow, too.
i don't think you've noticed this either: many, or even most, people who have jobs still can't afford to donate to political campaigns.
have you ever heard of child-labor? the so-called free market necessitates such things, from the perspective of THE BOTTOM LINE, the profit/greed motive.
maybe you're about to say "Everyone is Free to be Rich." unfortunately, "being rich" by definition means a CONCENTRATION of wealth, which by definition means other people aren't rich.
have you ever heard of colonialism? mercantilism? the subjugation of entire countries had "business", money, and resources as its goal.
have you heard of christopher columbus? his crews murdered many people for gold. they came to the so-called New World for money and resources. that's business.
and i'm sure you also haven't realized this: some of the most tyrannical regimes in modern history had "free markets." they even hunted down and imprisoned or executed communists (communists are people who oppose capitalism and say a lot of nasty things about "free markets). hitler and mussolini both gave entirely free reign to big business. (in your view, the bigger the business, the freer the people, right?)
you're telling me that when i denigrate those enterprises, i'm denigrating freedom?
if freedom only comes from business, then what did the "heros" you're talking about sacrifice to protect my freedom to live? you make no sense.
the idea that "freedom" only exists because of the free market is one of the most absurd things i've heard in recent times. maybe you were joking, maybe this doesn't need a response, but i can't say i'm very optimistic these days.
Re:Freedom comes from business (Score:3, Interesting)
Nixon's legacy has failed (Score:3, Interesting)
Nixon, facing down the Soviets, began a policy of economic entanglement with China. China was willing to move away from communism towards limited capitalism, but NOT towards democracy. Concerned by an arms race with China, wishing to put some ideological distance between the USSR and China, and in some part, driven by US corporate interests, Nixon launched us on a path which has lead to the consequences discussed in this article: when we do business with China, it is not unlike doing business with Nazi Germany. (Oh no, I invoked Godwin's law, but it is not out of order here.)
By tangling our economic system with China's, America received incredibly cheap labor, and the totalitarian elite in China received great wealth. America conveniently outsourced a lot of blue collar jobs to a country which didn't treat the worker as lavishly as we had to, which kicked organized labor in this country in the gnads, and was basically a similar exodus of jobs to what techies have experienced with India. We got (unethically) cheap labor, and the Chinese elite got rich. Some of this wealth trickled down, but you can be sure that in a non-democratic society, there have not been the mechanisms by which the poor could force some change in wealth distribution.
Nixon's, (and subsequent presidents'), not-so-secret policy towards China has been to hope that a wealthy middle-class would emerge and overthrow the wealthy elite. That has not happened. Look at the masacre in 1989 if you want an example of how easily totalitarian governments can keep control. Nothing has changed except the depth of corruption. In fact, China has actually GROWN in terms of the territory it administers, now able to command the lives of those in Hong Kong, for example. Nixon's policy has FAILED.
The average Chinese worker is a wage slave to American corporations. America exploits them. There is no other way to look at it, in my opinion. Democratic reform has not occured. The only real change has been that we are now dangerously dependent on the Chinese.
This dependency is very real, and very dangerous today. Look at our situation with North Korea. It is obvious the Chinese are not exerting the pressure they could wield there. Remember that train that blew up as it was going to make its way out of NK into China? What do you think that train was associated with carrying? How do you think nuke secrets made it to NK from Pakistan? By boat in international waters? No way! Through China. The Chinese have secretly been encouraging nuclear proliferation because they would rather we got into a nuke war with some minor player, like Pakistan, NK, or Iran. They would rather some other country, by proxy, took the punches and dished it out on us. If we are hurt by a nuke, China will be helped, ESPECIALLY in relation to Taiwan.
The Chinese government is our true enemy, and the people of China need to be liberated.
As an American, I want to see our government disinvest as quickly as it can from China. We should shift that investment into India and other countries with functioning democracies.
We need to punish and isolate the Chinese now before it is too late.
Re:Boycott Yahoo (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry to break this to you, but Americans aren't the ones bringing freedom to the world. Oppressed peoples earn their own freedom through grassroot movements and popular revolutions. In many cases, the American military are the ones who are subverting the voice/will of the people.
Many young American men from lower-class families are lured into the armed services and sent overseas under the pretense of being benevolent liberators bringing freedom and democracy to the rest of the world. But they are merely pawns in a game of deception and ruthless amassment of wealth, manipulated to carry out the exploitation of developing nations by corporate America.
And it's this ignorant conceit, that Americans are the selfless and unappreciated vanguards of democracy and freedom, that allows these neo-colonialistic policies to be put into action. Open your eyes, the foreign policy of the U.S. has always been self-interested. The only thing Americans are dying(or killing) to bring to the rest of the world is free markets for American corporations to expand into. Capitalism != freedom and democracy.
If we were interested in bringing freedom and democracy to the rest of the world, we would not try to overthrow, assassinate, or otherwise depose democratically elected foreign leaders and popular governments in order to lift their protectionist national policies that are in the way of American corporations exploiting these foreign economies. All we're interested in is political and economic posturing to set-up one-way trade relationships with these developing nations.
The U.S. is not "capitalist" (Score:1, Interesting)
There are ways to play it safe... (Score:1, Interesting)
There was a very good concept someone came up with several years ago to build an encrypted network on top of the internet. Myself and a few others decided to put forth the time and resources needed to bring it to fruition. What we ended up with is anoNet [brinkster.net].
Most of the info about the layout of the network is available at that link, but here is the "quick and dirty".
We took OpenVPN [openvpn.net] combined it with Quagga [quagga.net] then used IANA reserved address space to build a fault tolerant, encrypted, anonymous network. The basic premis is that you only know the ips of your peers. On top of that you make sure that the people that you peer with are in countries that are not on the best of terms when it comes to cooperating with law enforcement. IE: China -> US. This network is _primarily_ used for two purposes: 1 - We are a self contained (for lack of a better word) Darknet. We have root DNS servers, a search engine (mnogosearch), email (webmail if someone doesn't want to run their own), IM (jabber), Web servers (with the ability to post anonymous content, and by anonymous, I mean anonymous even from the people INSIDE anoNet), FTP servers, IRC, News servers, Asterisk VOIP (although this is still in testing), Proxy servers, etc..etc.. We have taken great pains to re-implement the internet but with anonymity and encryption in mind. 2 - To provide users in countries that restrict internet access (China) the ability to browse (proxy) in a secure, safe manner.
I was going to throw a few common questions and answers in here but this post is long enough. If you want more info we have a nice Wiki setup to handle just about any questions you could have (but you have to connect to access it).
Bottom line if the people mentioned in this article had been using our mail relays / proxies this wouldn't be an issue right now. If people in (supposedly) less oppressive countries want to make a difference in the world, then donate a little time and bandwidth to the cause [brinkster.net] instead of blowing up countries.
Re:Yahoo does this crap. (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that a lot of the multi-national coporations wield sufficient clout to get governments to change their laws. This is the laughable truth in the US, since politicians are dependent upon corporations to get elected.
From the parent of your post:
"Moreso, we cannot really fault companies who give in to China's demands. Companies operating within China's shores, or otherwise targetting the Chinese people will have to submit to Chinese law. If Yahoo or MSN did otherwise, then it is their company that would be in violation of the law."
But we can fault the people who have the power to affect the actions of Yahoo or MSN, who chose profits over ideals. These people are the customers of those companies, the shareholders in those companies, and the decision-makers in those companies.
We, as conscientious members of society, cannot apologize for corporate actions by just saying, "Well, profit is their only motive, so it's OK." We don't do that for polluters (even US companies who pollute outside the US), we don't do that for companies that utilize underage labor in miserable conditions, we don't do that for companies that perpetuate other human rights violations -- even if the governments of the countries where it is being done allow it.
You can draw a distinction between the company itself choosing to "do the deed," and the company being forced to as terms of doing business within a country. And yes, this distinction is important -- but it does not exonerate company X, who are providing the tools of enforcement to China.
Finally, I think it is naive to assume that eventually American companies will affect change from within China, because some of China's laws will hurt their profits. Chinese government bannination of those companies will hurt their profits even more. There is something to be said for cultural rub-off, but China's measures against free speech severely limit that rub-off.
Not taking action to affect positive change, when it is within your power, just because you think eventually the change will happen anyway? Isn't this the kind of apathy that has led the US into a lot of the problems we face today?
Re:Yahoo does this crap. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that I agree with it, but that is exactly what a corporation is legally bound to in the United States.
Corporations, to me, are just as threatening to my freedom as the Chinese government. In fact, a lot more threatening.