Google in China - The Big Disconnect

wile_e_wonka writes "The NY Times (registration required) has an article about Google's history in China (beginning way before this whole censorship thing). The article, among other things, talks about of Google's head of operations in China, and his goals for the company there. From the article: 'Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'"

Comments

liberated

[joe 155]

I like the way he talks about the liberating power of technology... so long as you don't want to discuss anything that the government doesn't agree with... or want to find out what happened in Tianamen square, or if you want to have unrestricted access to other webpages. But appart from that it does makes people completely free, free as a (caged) bird

Re:liberated

[Tackhead]

> I like the way he talks about the liberating power of technology... so long as you don't want to discuss anything that the government doesn't agree with... or want to find out what happened in Tianamen square, or if you want to have unrestricted access to other webpages. But apart from that it does makes people completely free, free as a (caged) bird

Well sure, but liberation.google.com is still just at the invite-only beta stage.

Re:liberated

[liangzai]

Well, I am reading this from China... please enlighten me, what exactly happened in Tiananmen Square (and didn't it in fact happen outside the square)? Is that 1989 pro-democracy movement that ended in a massacre (still outside the square)?

Since I am in China, there is no fucking way I can read your reply (according to your theory).

And since I am in China, I also can't discuss this issue with you here, also according to your theory.

The only thing that is certain is that I can't discuss this in Chinese here. But that is because of the incompetence of Slashdot, which doesn't allow for it.

Re:liberated

[IAmTheDave]

How is the U.S. government censoring the information you're want about Iraq? Oh, wait, it isn't. The U.S. is not perfect, but don't throw away perspective because of it.

While maybe not about Iraq, the US government is currently involved in the largest, most far reaching classification nightmare since Nixon. Aside from having made up dozens if not hundreds of new sensitive but unclassified classifications of documents that exempt millions of documents from the FOIA despite their unclassified status, the government was recently caught re-classifying some 55,000 historical documents out of the National Archive for no apparent reason other than to cover up historical embarassment on the part of the government.

Classification and secrets in this country are on par with several countries that we criticize for this very thing. The wind is slowly being taken out of the sails of the FOIA, and our right to know as citizens is being whittled away at an unbelievably alarming rate.

This is the most secret administration in the history of the US. Not only have they classified millions of new documents at a cost of billions to the taxpayer that normally would have been declassified in the past (1950s budget information for the CIA, for instance) but the secret re-classification of tens of thousands of documents that have been public for years is a scary, scary precident.

Take the words of the Memorandum of Understanding issued in regards to the now uncovered secret reclassification of documents from the national archive: "It is in the interests of both the CIA and the National Archives and Records Administration to avoid the kind of public notice and researcher complaints that may arise from removing from the open shelves for extended periods of time records that had been public available."

The GP was hardly out of perspective.

Re:liberated

[jheath314]

I'll agree with your main point that the comparison of the United States to China is unfair. Make no mistake; Bush has taken us quite a few steps down that path, but we still have a long way to go before we reach the ugly state of dictatorship confronting the Chinese.

At the risk of going totally OT, I want to pick a fight over this minor point in your post:

The matter of Iraq is a reactionary military invasion and subsequent occupation of a hostile state. We had every justification to take military military action against them from the moment they refused to honor their obligation to prove they lacked WMD's.

Prove to me that you aren't hiding the holy grail somewhere on your property. No, throwing open your doors to my inspectors and digging up your yard won't be good enough... give me *proof* that you didn't hide it in some devious place my inspectors haven't thought of yet.

As you can imagine, proving a negative is somewhat difficult. Given the short window between when inspectors were allowed back into Iraq and the time the US invaded, it would have been impossible for a country as large as Iraq to furnish such proof, even if they had wished to comply in good faith. I was actually pretty surprised by the extent the Iraqis cooperated with the inspections just before the invasion... few countries would tolerate such violations of sovereignty, whether they were hiding something or not. Could you imagine the United States bending over and letting inspectors from other countries in to its most sensitive military bases?

Too bad for Bush and the neo-cons that no WMD were found. Maybe next time they'll let facts guide policy, instead of wishful thinking.

Re:liberated

[Dis*abstraction]

Can't speak for "liangzai," but the article tries to convey the idea that Western cultural norms, and specifically our worshipful deference to free speech, aren't universal by any means. Even here in the West, there are limits to freedom of speech--kiddie porn, as has been mentioned, but also things like Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi speech are censored in many parts of what we'd call the "free world." Ultimately the justification is that these policies promote a certain way of thinking, and stigmatize the repugnant; is it so inconceivable to you that Chinese culture might draw the line elsewhere?

This isn't to apologize for the government's repression of Tibetans, or its habit of haphazard and arbitrary detentions (which are growing less haphazard and arbitrary), or any of the rest of it. No government is perfect; the difference, perhaps, is that China's citizens feel theirs is improving, while I'm not so sure you could say the same about ours (I'm American).

Re:liberated

[krewemaynard]

paranoia, cha cha cha

Re:liberated

[cbreaker]

I don't buy it.

Why is it okay for the Government to keep secrets? Perhaps some aspects of the military; troop locations and such - are something that should be kept a secret. But for almost everything else, I don't see it. We ARE the government, supposedly. We The People. It's supposed to be the citizens that make up the country and the government - why should only a few people be granted more access to YOUR country then you? What makes them so special? They're just people too. Citizens of our country.

Registration Free Link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23googl e.html?ex=1303444800&en=972002761056363f&ei=5090&p artner=rssuserland&emc=rss

How the Internet will REALLY be used in China

[skitheboat]

All lofty stuff in the article about getting "fully educated"... but in reality (as seen in the US and other places), I can envision one billion Chinese reading Slashdot, gambling online, surfing for porn, and watching paint dry

Yeah that's what'll happen.

[merlin_jim]

students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.'

Cause, you know, just look at the US - Internet access for the past 10 years has turned the current crop of high schoolers into a bunch of geniuses, all just itching to discover antigravity or write a new sociopolitical theory that eliminates inflation and market swings...

lol of course on the other hand my little brother of 14 is writing better games than I was at 18...

Getting around Chinas Firewall

[bigwavejas]

Unfortunately I think a lot of what's seen in China is going to be censored, even if there are ways to get around their firewall (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4496163.s tm). I think most people aren't technically savvy enough or too lazy to bother searching for ways to beat the system, but there are those who will (even if its just a handful) and one can only hope the information will disseminate to the average person in China.

Re:Getting around Chinas Firewall

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I think most people aren't technically savvy enough or too lazy to bother searching for ways to beat the system

You're dead on here. I've read articles on the BBC about how many Chinese people actually support censorship. They, not the government, put pressure on local newcasts to only report "happy news". Many Chinese people view the restrictions as helpful in weeding out unwelcome "foreign influence".

While it might come as a big surprise to Slashdotters, I suspect that the majority of Chinese people know that they are being censored and they really don't care. They are more interested in buying apartments to live in and saving up for more consumer goods than worrying about whether or not they can search for anything under the sun. I also suspect that most Chinese people would be very surprised to learn that many in the west view them as living under a repressive government. I have no doubt that the majority of Chinese people would not make such an assessment themselves.

Re:Getting around Chinas Firewall

[Dis*abstraction]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id =4462719

In case the story's censored by those dastardly profit-motivated editors of the Economist, the most relevant bit is "there were some 74,000 protests last year, involving more than 3.7m people; up from 10,000 in 1994 and 58,000 in 2003. Sun Liping, a Chinese academic, has calculated that demonstrations involving more than 100 people occurred in 337 cities and 1,955 counties in the first 10 months of last year. This amounted to between 120 and 250 such protests daily in urban areas, and 90 to 160 in villages. These figures are likely to be conservative. Chinese officials often try to cover up disturbances in their areas to avoid trouble with their superiors."

I'll add that more than half China's population lives in the rural countryside, eking out sustenance on increasingly infertile soil. Development and industrial pollution threaten their land, and the income gap between them and the privileged urban rich--which makes America's income inequality look like a rounding error--causes a great deal of resentment. At least that's what I'm told.

educate the peons

[dajobi]

"students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves."

Do MIT and Harvard distribute course materials in Chinese now?

Hm, let's see...

[greenguy]

students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves

That sounds great... until you think it through. Besides connected villages, this would also requires students who have...

1. Advanced English, including technical vocabulary.
2. A high-school education. A *good* high-school education.
3. Reliable power and Internet connections.
4. Consistent and extensive access to a computer hooked up to the net. A printer might be nice, too.
5. Considerable time to study.
6. Exceptional levels of self-motivation.
7. No problems with the government, which will inevitably monitor their activities.
8. No problems with family, which might or might not think this is a good use of one's time.
9. Etc.

I'm all about the rural poor becoming educated in China and everywhere, but it's going to take more than access to Google to do it.

Re:Hm, let's see...

[sielwolf]

Yeah, his statements are especially interesting considering that China no longer provides free primary and secondary school education. That basically means the entire 800 million sustenance-farming population lost its one way into the Chinese boom. And now all the young Chinese either work on the farm to get enough food to eat or go off to join the unskilled migrant economy. Sitting down for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to study MIT course work is comically implausible (especially for peoples who indoor plumbing would be a stunning advancement). And it isn't like China is just going to roll out internet and computers next week. Dividing any program budget by 800 million means there isn't much to spend per-rural citizen.

But I doubt there's much interest in that. I mean, why dry up your giant resevoir of hypercheap labor, the very thing keeping your economy chugging along?

Re:Hm, let's see...

[hotdiggitydawg]

Not to mention that they will be getting all this for free. I was fortunate enough to avoid a crippling student debt, but I have to wonder whether the availability of these materials irks American students. You come out of university after X years with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and yet someone somewhere else can get access to the same knowledge for free? For all you know Chinese universities could simply cut-and-paste the entire course, and I bet their students don't owe ridiculous amounts of money once they graduate.

Of course they can't leave the country, or enjoy many of the personal freedoms we have either, I guess...

Re:Hm, let's see...

[ajs]

I don't think anyone graduating from MIT is under the illusion that they paid all of that money for the course materials. The quality of the instructors, access to the research environment and the opportunities available to someone who is able to graduate from MIT are what you are paying for. The course materials are just the starting point.

Google Freedom 2.0

[digitaldc]

students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves.

But what good is an ivy-league education if you can't freely express your ideas?

"fully educate themselves."

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if those students in China will be able to fully educate themselves about the events of the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. I don't mean that they'll only learn about the Communist Party's history of the event, which differs with almost every other account including the eyewitnesses there. But I wonder if they'll be permitted to learn about the thousands of unarmed people that were shot and killed, the Tank Man, and the executions and jailings of the protestors.

If not, then these students won't be fully educated at all.

Re: "fully educate themselves."

[liangzai]

You know, I just searched for "Tank Man" on http://www.baidu.com/ (the premier search engine in China, unaffected by the firewall), and the first link that came up was http://beyondpleasure.blogchina.com/4886647.html

It indeed has the picture and the story (in brief), and the page was indeed fetched from within China.

People all know about this, and this information will never go away. But you will not see it discussed in official media or anything like that.

Re: "fully educate themselves."

[sydneyfong]

Yes.

I am technically from China as well (Hong Kong) as well, although I have never grown up in any "communist state" (whatever that means).

Most people criticing China's "human rights" problems don't stick to facts, but to proganda by the western media that is almost twenty years old. They like to believe that "my country is better than yours", despite the fact that this is becoming more and more doubtful.

Let me say this: nobody cares about people in China. All they care about is that "American values are better than Chinese values (and you should adopt them at whatever cost, even if it means that you overthrow your own government)". I mean, if anyone really takes a serious look at what actually happens in China, I'm sure they'll suddenly find that their dicks weren't as long as they previously thought.

PS: Of course, there are those who really do care. But those people typically tackle the issue realistically instead of suggesting an overthrow of the CCP or something to that effect.

Re: "fully educate themselves."

[liangzai]

I am not FROM China, but I am in China. The crap that is floating around here is typical China bashing stuff. It has some merits to it, but it is skewed and out of proportion. There is a myth that the Chinese are censored beyond belief, when the truth is that the internet censorship is very mild. And there is always this Tiananmen Guangchang issue coming up, as if the Chinese would associate that square primarily with the June 4th incident. They don't. It is a small thing in Chinese history, and also in the square's history. The Chinese are informed about it, and most people know someone who was there.

Americans who think that the Chinese are longing for democracy, that they can't wait until Falun gong becomes legal again, that they want a free Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan and what have you, and so on, are clearly delusional and know nothing about China. They are projecting American values on the Chinese, but it simply doesn't work that way.

China has a long way to go, and will probably never have a democracy like the US has (and even less a democracy of the European caliber), but they will have something similar -- perhaps better, and definitely better suited to Chinese conditions.

So my little roll here is just to try to strike a balance. People who gets modded informative for just mentioning the square incident should be modded -5 uninformative, really. It is just too simple to be informative, but it appeals to the usual mob of China bashers who are on an American cultural imperialistic crusade against anything unamerican.

China is much more complicated than that, and China is also in a lenghty process of transition, from planned economy to capitalism, from poverty to wealth, from madness to freedom. I'd rather see a discussion on that process than the usual hoopla on the square.

Pipe Dream

[Zebra_X]

The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves

"Fully Educate Themselves". Not likely. For one, the courses are in english. Two, almost all of the courses on M.I.T.'s Open Courseware site require the purchase of multiple $100+ text books. In addition there is no feedback when following the courses. Unless you understand *how* to learn its very difficult to use these courses effectively.

Those are issues though, that only come to pass when "all the villiages are connected" and by definition reliably powered (which they are not). Furthermore, access is great - however the very nature of learning, long periods of reading, problem solving require that those wishing to learn have a dedicated console, or computer to utilize.

I'm all for educating the masses, I just think that running around spouting this "vision" is disingenuous.

Corrupted Database Gives False Sense of Knowledge

[rewinn]

Deliberate data corruption, such as censorship, can give users the illusion that they are well informed when the data permitted through appears authoritative. Ponder, for example, the confidence one felt upon reading cherry-picked information about Iraq; Judy Miller may well have thought she was better informed when in fact she was less informed.

How, then, can the data corruption be exposed, and who is motivated to do it?

One approach is maximizing the number of links to censored pages, to alert the censored individual that their data is corrupt. However there must be more effective techniques.

Perhaps more important, there must be a way to motivate individuals to fix this data corruption; forgive me for being cynical, but if there were a way to profit from the repair, that would be a powerful motivator.

RTFA. You missed a major point.- risk taking.

[Tungbo]

The author started his journey fixated on an 'absolutist' stance on freedom of speech, much as you are demonstrating. In the course of developing the article, he came to see that there ARE gradations in such freedom and that insisting on jummping instantly to an imagined 'pure' state may not be that productive.
It's so easy to look pious rather than make the hard choices as Google did.

The most exciting behavior that I read in the article is the exploding level
of voluntary participation, expression, and personal choice to take more risk.
It is NOT the technologies themselves, but the behavior and perception changes
that they enable that will make the biggest difference.

I don't know ...

[constantnormal]

... what the answer here is -- I'm not entirely convinced that access to a censored internet will somehow eventually blossom into a democratic China, nor am I entirely convinced that it is possible (or impossible) to effectively censor the internet.

But I AM convinced that if the Chinese were to completely block outside content, creating a Chinese intranet with only government-approved content, it would be a stable system, and would satisfy the Chinese people's need for contact and communications... and would also be a horrible thing to have happen.

So I reluctantly support the western net services doing business in China under Chinese totalitarian rules.

But I do wonder how the Chinese authorities are going to deal with the influx of lots of tourists at the Olympic games, many of whom will want to photograph Tianamem Square and will inevitably ask a lot of awkward questions. If the Chinese want to interact with the West, they cannot avoid these things.

Recent PBS Frontline espisode

[Retired Replicant]

In recent Frontline episode on the Tianamen Square "Tank Man" (really a report on China's political and economic evolution since the massacre), it made it seem that the Chinese government has stopped funding public education in rural areas. Peasants now have to pay to send their children to school, which most can't afford. It seems as though China is working very intently on keeping the rural peasants ignorant and illiterate, so that they can be more easily controlled and exploited by the government, Western corporations, and the "new Chinese capitalist elite" in the big cities. I find it hard to believe that the Chinese government would allow this incredibly valuable slavelike underclass to learn enough to read web pages. The only ones who will benefit are the new Chinese capitalist elite, who have a similar vested interest in keeping the underclass ignorant.

that's a ling distance . . .

[dweebzilla]

"students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T."

Will they also get other "ideas" from that coursework ... Shanghai is a long way to go to retrieve the Caltech Cannon.

Re:They're not even close...

[Spaceman40]

Unfortunately, they're not the only ones. Ask university students in the US, and I'd bet that around half wouldn't be able to tell you much about the Kent State shootings (I mean, I knew about them, but I had to look up the name). Makes you wonder about other things you aren't taught about...