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China Emphasizes Laws As Google Defies Censorship
Lomegor writes "Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said on Thursday that all companies are welcome to operate in China but that they must do so under local laws. Although not explicitly, this is in some way a response to Google's threat to leave the country. China also stated that they have strict cyber laws and that they forbid any kind of 'hacking attack'; when asked if those laws apply to the government as well it was quickly avoided. 'It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows,' the official in the State Council Information Office was quoted as saying." I sure would love to be a fly on the wall of these discussions. We certainly live in interesting times.
It seems that google has moved firmly into politics. I wonder if as a kid good ol' Sergey Brinn would have ever imaged how much of a difference he would make in the world.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Prediction #1 - google.cn becomes unavailable in China today, never to return.
Prediction #2 - no other companies will stand with Google on this matter, preferring to endure Chinese hackers rather than turning away Chinese business.
At this point, does Google even have a real choice in the matter? If they don't out and out leave China very soon, then they will forever be perceived as weak. The Chinese will consider them to be feeble pushovers. Not only that, but in the Western world they'll also be seen as weak, for caving in on the issue of censorship.
China to Google: "Listen to us and obey our laws, even though they do not apply to us and we will abuse this power against your company and your users."
Even worse is that Google probably fears their technology will fall in the hands of the Chinese who will just build an alternative google *exacly* as they like it, and not like before with 'cooperation' from google. This way China wins and Google is left without a market in China at all, leaving with a damaged reputation for 'helping' the Chinese oppression and gaining nothing in the end... Pulling out is the wise thing to do, but not on their own. They have only said 'until here and no further', if Google moves out of China it will be because China makes them, and then Google is the hero of the story and China will be the party losing face.
And you will stop trying to apply them to us because we wrote them!
Reading the link below, you will realise that china state hackers
1) have dedicated datacenters for them
2) Work around the clock in 3 shifts during each 24 hours
3) Have specialised teams for things like a) Break in b) Data stealing c) Footprinting
Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Not politic, business.
Operating in china does not bring google profit. Add Baidou, a govt-subsidied competition and being routinelly hacked, they have reasons leave market. Saying they leave market makes them look weak and stock price would drop.
Making chinese goverment kick them out makes for quite nice PR stunt and will not really to much about stock price. And it actually makes them look strong.
They are still happy to censor in many other countries.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
The Chinese constitution has allowed free speech since 1982 (not that that mattered much 2 years afterwards). That is, censorship is officially *against* the Chinese constitution. I'd actually like to see this go to court; if it's a fair trial, the Chinese probably will end up being better off because of it.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The rest of the world must follow our rules. But we could not.
They will lose only if Chinese Firewall starts blocking them. You can't lose part of Internet market by moving outside of country.
we will all pay a steep price for our hypocrisy contempt and cowardice towards China human rights abuse, censorship, lies and manipulation
The original post thinks it would interesting to be the fly on the wall to the "discussions"
I lived over there for 5 years. I don't think it would be quite so interesting unless you haven't been following Chinese politics and all for the past 15 (or 65) years. There will likely be two camps in the Gov't. One that sees the problems of letting a company like Google be forced out of China (call them the Capitalists) and the group that has been trying to make this sort of thing happen ever since the first let foreign companies in in the first place (the Nationalist Communists if you will).
The thing of it is, the Capitalists sympathize with the Nationalists. They just don't want it to be so overt and obvious.
You just have to understand they don't see what they're doing as wrong in any way. Protecting their regime is #1. It has been for thousands of years for whoever is in power there. Currently you can describe it as Nationalism. Go back and read about the lead up to WWI and you'll get a sense of the mind set of many of the people in China, if not the majority. War (with Taiwan) would be glorious, an Empire is a right of China's and to some Everything (worldwide) is part of China and maps should show that.
Doesn't bring Google profit? With a 30+% market share that sounds unlikely. Could you please cite your source on that?
Exactly. They do in USA too, just look at the "x number of results were removed because of DMCA laws". It's basically the same thing, just different area. It's something US government see important, just like Chinese government see important the areas they're censoring. You can argue that "it's not the same thing", but really, it is. Different culture, different people. Remember that Chinese probably think some of your laws and censorship is weird and hilarious.
What do you think US courts would say if a company would come to operate in US but wouldn't work under US laws because they think differently on the issues? Exactly the same.
As an American who has lived in China on-and-off several times for years, I have to say that you can't expect anything that the government does/says to be even nearly logical or otherwise make sense.
My other expat friends and I used to joke that China was the source of all anti-logic in the world -- that is, the closer that you get to China, the less things make sense. If you've ever visited, then you'll understand.
But if China's going to go around breaking other nations' laws, whining about it happening to them just makes them look stupid, opportunistic, and greedy (which, again, worked out for the Americans /rimshot). If they want people to take their laws seriously, they'll have to do what the States did, and actually start getting along with the other nations with mutual agreements and enforcement. I don't think they will.
No, they'll just wait till they're losing more to lack of IP enforcement than they gain, then they'll start complaining.
My employer does a lot of business in China, both development work and sales into the chinese market.
This incident with google has really made me stop and think about whether the whole game is rigged.
Invest in China? Your technology will stolen by chinese competitors.
Outcompete your chinese competitors? The local laws will be changed in their favor.
Complain? Your people will be arrested.
Leave? Your assets will be nationalized.
The chinese haven't done any of that stuff to my employer, as far as I know. But it is the only country we do business in where the question might even come up.
It turns out that doing business in a country without the rule of law entails some serious business risks.
I wonder how many executives are having this same thought, right now?
http://xkcd.com/756//
I sure would love to be a fly on the wall of these discussions. We certainly live in interesting times.
No you wouldn't. It's not that lively - on the contrary it is quite boring, full of ritual and face saving. If you ever have a case of insomnia attend one of these meetings - it will be clearly taken care of.
Now if you want a bit of excitement, political meetings that have some energy, then go to UK parliment meetings - especially when the prime minister is around. I remember watching video's of former PM Blair and boy was exciting. The guy was in the center of the room, turning around and launching off complex answers to complex questions. Any political group where you can get a bunch of old boys to start a fist fight will be exciting...and you will not see that in a Chinese gov't meeting.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Moral relativism needs to be shot to hell.
Comparing the DMCA to political censorship and torture is ridiculous.
Did you even read what I said?
Different cultures and people have different values. Just because you think something is more moral doesn't mean everyone does so. Your mentality and thinking mostly comes from the culture you grow in. So does theirs. Yes, they protest. So do people in the US - just see all the battle about patents, MPAA/RIAA and other issues here on slashdot.
Now I do not either think it's the same thing. But trying to force the same kind of thinking you have to other people, especially to people in other cultures, just sickens me. And US is particularly known for forcing their laws to other places in the world, even forcefully.
The GP accuses you of commiting a fallacy of scale, and I must say I agree.
Sure you can logically draw comparisons between the DMCA and chinese censorship laws, it's not particularly hard or imaginative. The problem is when you compare the two on equal grounds. One involves gross violations of basic human rights, the other involves less Brittany Spears remixes on youtube.
Don't get me wrong, I have strong moral issues with the US patent and copyright laws. But I have far greater issues with human rights violations, regardless of who commits them. Not all atrocities are created equal.
Call me crazy, but I don't excuse the things the Chinese government does just because they convinced their population that they should. If thinking that basic human rights are universal makes me an imperialistic American dog, then I am a proud imperialistic American dog.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Look, I've taken enough classes in philosophy to understand moral relativism. I read what you said, and I disagree. People in the US argue and complain because quite frankly the government and corporations in the US are judged to impossibly high standards. Westerners tend to be idealists and when something doesn't approach their ideals, they complain, loudly over the internet.
However, Humans Rights are a Universal Truth, they come from our human nature, our instincts and the way our brains are wired, and China is a country that is committing gross violations towards it's own Citizens. What should really sicken you is the communist parties destruction of their own ancient culture and peoples.
I should add, if you're feeling sick, you should visit the doctor.
It is not "that they are censoring", it is "what they are censoring" that gets human rights violations involved.
If google censored websites about Gitmo for the US government, I would be equally inflamed.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Humans Rights are a Universal Truth, they come from our human nature, our instincts and the way our brains are wired
[citation needed]
The GP accuses you of commiting a fallacy of scale, and I must say I agree.
Sure you can logically draw comparisons between the DMCA and chinese censorship laws, it's not particularly hard or imaginative. The problem is when you compare the two on equal grounds. One involves gross violations of basic human rights, the other involves less Brittany Spears remixes on youtube.
I'd argue that freedom of speech counts as a basic human right.
Regardless, the DMCA has been used to censor material critical of the Church of Scientology from appearing on Google search results. Is that political speech, to you? Google also censors Nazi-related materials in Germany. Is that political speech, to you? Sure, perhaps the US doesn't jail political dissidents quite the same way China does, but what's Guantanamo Bay? Sure, there's a difference in scale, but the difference isn't as great as many people think.
The original point is that Google is demanding uncensored search results in China, but not in the US or Germany. There's no fallacy of scale here, unless you wish to argue that the US is more deserving of censorship since they commit fewer human rights violations?
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
I get furious with the DMCA, especially when it is abused for censorship purposes. I also have some very serious issues with the US government and what it is/has been doing. I have two short points to make though:
1) Actions taken by the US government do not excuse actions taken by the Chinese government.
2) You either have an incredibly warped sense of scale, or you are not very familar with the Chinese censorship program.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I'm not trying to defend China - I'm just interested in where we draw the line. At what point does censorship become a human rights violation severe enough to require non-cooperation? Some forms of censorship have widespread public support (e.g. child porn).
So, is DMCA-style censorship bad enough?
Censorship of pornography or violence in films?
Restrictions on what news can be reported or discussed openly?
I don't think any country is completely free of questionable activities in the area of human rights. China is worse than most, to be sure.
I'm not sure why he's been tagged a troll. What he says is true. People in the West have the benefit of living comfortable, carefree lives where they have the luxury of worrying about relatively insignificant problems. It's really not surprising people blow things out of proportion.
Things like DMCA are, without question, garbage. We should indeed fight to end this sort of thing. But stop trying to make it out to seem some kind of moral crusade where something profoundly crucial to our existence is somehow at stake. No one's going to die if they can't enjoy the current popular tv show, the latest Hollywood blockbusters or music from untalented, overrated pop stars.
Frankly, from my experience I don't think most Chinese are concerned about political censorship or torture and in fact seem to believe it's a good thing to maintain social order. But the fact remains that people from many parts of the world would laugh at us and the pathetic things we get worked up about.
They do in USA too
Huh?
Others have pointed out you're comparing apples to apple seeds here, but there is a larger point to be made, the Cold War equivalent of Godwin's Law: Anyone who responds to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is has immediately lost the argument because they have failed to address any of the criticisms, but instead introduced a lot of emotionally-charged irrelevancy based on the false assumption that the original critic is somehow an admirer or defender of the United States.
It didn't make any sense during the Cold War (for us non-Americans, especially!) and it makes even less sense now. The American Empire is broadly speaking evil. Everything thinking person agrees with this. To impute the belief that the American Empire is basically good too someone who points out how utterly vile the Chinese government is, and then to try to turn the discussion to the completely irrelevant area of American crimes, is simply the act of someone who knows how evil the Chinese government is, who knows they do not have a single fact to defend the Chinese government with, and who wants to distract everyone by bringing up how evil the American Empire is.
So let's call it "Godwin's Second Law" that anyone pulling this particular lame stunt automatically loses, and move on to the actual subject of discussion in this thread, which is how outrageous it is for the Chinese government to pretend that the rule of law is the least bit important.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It seems that google has moved firmly into politics.
Hardly. This is about Google getting annoyed with China flouting their own laws.
As a server admin I routinely see hacking attempts on our servers emanating from within China. Any attempt to follow this up with the owner of the netblock where the attacks originate from is usually just met with a bounceback from the abuse address or silence.
This has been the case for years as China have no interest in a clampdown on their own citizens hacking. I have long suspected that this was because they were actively recruiting hackers who broke the law if the hackers in question were pro-government and did not want to cut off their own recruiting stream.
I think it is probably most likely that Google saw themselves being attacked, and got fairly aggressive in trying to determine who was attacking them. They almost certainly would have had to break the law to do this so are going to be a little cagey about exactly what they did. They did however probably notice that this was being organised from within certain government IP ranges and instantly went running to the US state department.
The fact is that China is not willing to even pretend to play by the rules of common netiquette. Until they change this I would much rather have an option to have all traffic to any of our servers from China dropped far upstream. I know I can do this at a firewall level but then we still can billed for bandwidth if we go over a certain level and they still have the option of DoS by overload. No, what I want is the ability to have our upstream provider drop all traffic into our IP range if it even looks like it came from China. We have no interest in doing business there so allowing traffic from an internet rogue state is just a liability for us.
I dont read
Saying they leave market makes them look weak and stock price would drop.
Funny, that's exactly what all the state-run chinese newspapers are saying.
And the reason I don't buy it is that plenty of internet companies have dropped various services in various countries and they never needed a scapegoat - American business doesn't give a shit about "saving face" like that.
In fact, one of the most positive things a US business can say is, "this market has proven to be unprofitable so we are cutting our losses by exiting it" - that tends to cause the stock price to go UP because investors expect that the company will no longer be losing money in an unprofitable venture. In the west, there is no shame associated with stopping the loss of more money.
So, while a story about needing to save face may play well with people who have spent all their lives in a culture that values face as much as they do in China, it is just an example of how "the east" has its own share of problems with understanding the way "the west" works.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I tried looking for one but they're all censored.
Comparing jailing political dissidents to Guantanamo Bay is comparing apples and oranges. China jails internal dissidents, Gitmo is for enemy combatants who are necessarily foreign to the U.S. There are no American citizens in Gitmo, their lawyers would have a field day.
And equating DMCA with political censorship is plain silly. Sure, some lawyers may try to pervert DMCA, but that isn't the law's intent.
What....where are you getting this info? All the estimates I've seen suggest Google is making hundreds of millions in revenue from China, and their expenses can't be THAT much. Why do you think they aren't making money? As far as I can tell they are quite profitable.
Qxe4
Go back and read about the lead up to WWI and you'll get a sense of the mind set of many of the people in China, if not the majority. War (with Taiwan) would be glorious, an Empire is a right of China's and to some Everything (worldwide) is part of China and maps should show that.
You know I think that is the part of the Chinese mindset that worries me the most. I actually understand the talk about wanting peace and tranquility and valuing that over freedom. I am not saying I agree with said values, but I can understand them. However, as you mentioned, the current mindset that Chinese nationalists have has been seen in the world before, about 100 years ago in fact. Hopefully most of us remember what a glorious cluster fuck that turned out to be for the world. Everyone had their shiny new guns and thought they were the biggest and baddest on the block...millions died. The world was left in shambles...It's funny, I remember hearing a friend of mine in high school argue about how the world had grown out of that phase....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
There is no effort being made to censor the information based on the DMCA. The act it designed to prevent people from using copyrighted works without paying for them, and that is exactly how it is used. The works are still publicly available, you just have to pay for them. I'm not saying that it's the right thing to do, but it's not the same thing at all.
One sentence later:
Assuming you are equating "the United States" with this "American Empire" then you have dismissed your own argument; if not, then you merely have a straw man, which is irrelevant. While the following statement is simply an ad hominem attack on anyone who disagrees with you, I thought I'd include it for the irony. Perhaps you should think this through more.
(And on the original topic, I hardly defend China's position on human rights and freedom and censorship issues. But then I'm an "evil" American of the US variety, and many of us tend to take issue with these sorts of things.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Anyone who responds to a criticism of any country with a rant about how bad the United States is has immediately lost the argument
(...)
The American Empire is broadly speaking evil. Everything thinking person agrees with this.
Wow. Just .. wow. You completely undermined your own fantastic point less than 3 sentences after you made it. I could try to respond to this by pointing out all the good the United States does in the world, and how I believe they're second to none in that department, but what would be the point? I'm apparently not one of your "everything thinking people," just some dumb Canadian who'd rather have the USA, flawed & imperfect as it is, at the top of the food chain than any other country out there.
... Humans Rights are a Universal Truth, they come from our human nature, our instincts and the way our brains are wired, and China is a country that is committing gross violations towards it's own Citizens
Go back to those philosophy classes/books, you forgot the bit about evidence and questioning your assumptions. Human rights are not a universal truth, "2+2=4" is a universal truth, beyond that we really don't have any. If human rights were a universal truth, their formulation would be invariant through time, and I could pull out a datum of evidence and wave it in the face of those who disagree.
No, human rights are a social/political formulation at worst, and a bit of prescriptive system building at best.
Our brains are wired to be largely amoral opportunists, we generally only give any empathetic consideration to those in our immediate family or social circle. We evolved this way, we don't give a shit about the species or the larger society, we only really care (innately) for those things that help our reproduction and the health of our offspring. I don't see the chance for a "censorship is bad" characteristic to evolve into our species.
I have never seen a wholly convincing descriptive (innate and universally existant) moral/ethical system, but I have seen a ton of prescriptive systems (thou ought). Prescriptive statements from "hard" philosophy (being that it isn't in the realm of any other science, barring the ineptly named "political science") generally have the same intellectual rigor as those found in classic books such as the Bible (no, coming from me that isn't a compliment).
I agree with you, though, that china over steps their bounds. But until I see a measurement of a universal human right, I will generally pass over all talk of "rights". I read somewhere that rights are those thing which you can convince others you have, and this seems about as apt a description I can find.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
As a server admin I routinely see hacking attempts on our servers emanating from within China. Any attempt to follow this up with the owner of the netblock where the attacks originate from is usually just met with a bounceback from the abuse address or silence.
This has been the case for years as China have no interest in a clampdown on their own citizens hacking. I have long suspected that this was because they were actively recruiting hackers who broke the law if the hackers in question were pro-government and did not want to cut off their own recruiting stream.
Having seen what IT in China is like, I'll state an alternative reason.
The quality of "IT" people there generally sucks. It's like, if it works, then I don't care whether bad things are done with my connection/computer/whatever. Network administrators have other things to worry about (eg. complying with censorship laws). With sites like Facebook and Youtube periodically on and off the censorship list, they just expect things to break. Malware on the computer making things slow? Just another bad day, maybe it will be better tomorrow.
There simply is nothing of quality in IT circles over there. Complying with standards and protocols? Only if it's mandated by the state. Why would they care about this English speaking guy who talks about being hacked? It's not like they understand your English too well anyway, and it's none of their business.
Honestly, even being culturally Chinese, I still couldn't stand their tastes on choice of software and their tolerances of utterly crappy IT systems. (Well, their tastes in general, are really crap) It's no surprise that they're indifferent to requests from some random outsider like you.
Don't quote me on this.
Enemy combatants who don't wear a uniform or other identifying marks are terrorists.
As such, pretending that they deserve the due process of the law is laughable.
For starters, it's wrong. Enemy combatants who don't wear a uniform are not protected by Geneva conventions, yes, but that doesn't make them terrorists. Terrorism is when you deliberately attack civilian population, to induce terror and garner publicity for your cause. Whether one is a "legal" or "illegal" combatant, uniformed or not, is entirely irrelevant. For example, there were numerous acts of terror perpetrated by uniformed soldiers of the legitimate army of Iraq under Saddam. There were quite a few cases perpetrated by uniformed soldiers of the U.S. Army in Vietnam. And so on.
Furthermore, without due process of law, you do not know if those people are really enemy combatants not wearing a uniform, or it's a lie (or deliberate omission of facts) by people who captured them. What you're saying is not at all different from saying, "people who kill someone are murderers, and pretending that they deserve the due process of law is laughable".
Assuming you're an American, please go find a copy of the constitution of your country, and re-read it, paying attention. It really is a wonderful document; I only wish more Americans would actually know what it says (all of it, not just areas they believe to be more important, and not skipping the areas they find inconvenient).
As a side note, what's wrong with giving any criminal, no matter how detestable, due process of law? If they're guilty, they will be sentenced as such, and last I checked, U.S. still has death penalty on Federal level (and I'd presume such people would come under Federal jurisdiction). So what's your problem? You're afraid that there is insufficient evidence, and they might be found innocent? Well then, perhaps, they shouldn't have been detained in the first place?