I couldn’t quite bring myself to put the name, the word, the verb, or whatever it is in the title, as it has been used so much recently. I will attempt, however, to highlight what a difficult position the Google hierarchy are now in, one certainly not all of their own making but also how the moral as well as profitable thing to do may well be to hang around in the Middle Kingdom for a bit longer yet. However, first a little Google bashing.
For me and my petty concerns, Google went too far when they started incorporating alternative logo styles and random selections of daily information on their .com search engine, presuming that we the masses, in our beautiful diversity, would all be interested in whatever soupcon of news or random image they felt entitled to share with us. However, this didn’t stop me continuing to use their services; my Gmail account, the Google Chrome Browser, my first blog post on Blogger and all the googling I have continued to do. For others, it was the dilution of Google’s border-less approach to information accessibility when they started dealing with China that spelt the beginning of the end. Though those protestors may well now feel, in the short term at least, slightly appeased! Maybe inserting a little snippet of daily information and a different logo image into their search engine showed a little too much arrogance for my liking, censoring its site to adhere to Chinese government dictates, at the cost of defending the principle of freedom of speech/ information and a consequential respect for basic human rights was obviously too much for others.
The uniformity and homogeneity of their approach has always, for me, been Google’s guiding force. It may be their ubiquity, overconfidence and desire for growth that will be seen as their downfall, though it still could be the continued making of them – more on that later. Somebody said to me recently: “They are only a search engine”, well, that is not quite true, they are aspiring to more than that. The fact that the Google infrastructure seems to have been breached and thus compromised, may be a step too far for other interested parties, those judging things from a much more prosaic body of reasoning. These might be potential customers of Google’s increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous applications, which include, amongst others, large corporations and the US Federal Government, who respectively desire profit, efficiency and particularly information integrity above all else.
Google may well gain as an upshot of these intrigues and as a twist on the old economic- political dichotomy, the famed political ‘bounce’, as a consequence of these so-called Chinese actions and what in all likelihood will be the Chinese government’s damning response- although they might surprise us as they are so far simply censoring Google.cn themselves. It is still hard to believe they will let the .com information and images fly for too much longer. However, things may from now on not be quite as Google would have liked them to be and maybe, in some senses that is no bad thing. There is nothing wrong with someone being really good at what they do, but when someone attempts to be all things to all people, problems can ensue and often justifiably so, we may only need ask the Chinese Government about that.
Human rights, national priorities, inter-cultural integration/dependence, long-term business projections, customer base alienation, mis-communication, intellectual property rights, freedom of information, copying, copying well and copying increasingly sophisticated products are a few of the issues that have been thrown up here, as well as questions that surround the future viability of Google Inc. and the Great Chinese Firewall as all conquering, though contrasting, web-based information megaliths.
In reality, the pre-eminence of either would probably not be good for us. Just maybe, the collision between these two enmities will constrain the reach of the other. However, what is more likely is they will both just go from strength to strength in their own backyards, leaving us in our isolated societies, whistling into the unforgiving winds of corporation/ government monopolies and modern life homogeneity (over and above a single web page’s design that is!). Maybe, if Google’s motivation on coming to China was profit and a slight reduction of “evil”, through a step-by-step increase of information to the Chinese people, then maybe they should stand their ground. Why it might be asked, when their whole business is potentially imperiled by this cyber infiltration? Because a Baidu monopoly in China isn’t going to do much for internal and inter-cultural understanding / dialogue and would probably help to create a stark cultural divide between a Chinese and a non-Chinese mindset. As an aside, I don’t believe, given Google’s influence in the dissemination of world information, that this is over-stating the case.
Ironically, it might seem staying to fight for the 80 million plus China users is actually the moral position to take, if that is what we are talking about here. Conversely, dumping the 80 million user profits in the name of ‘ethics’ is actually neither practical, in a business sense, or particularly ethical either, as it will not achieve what many would like to see, the opening of information to the Chinese people. These are questions about a political system’s integrity, and as perverse as that might seem to some western watchers, pressuring it and isolating it isn’t going to help anybody. This seems to be a recurring theme, when dealing with things from a Chinese government perspective, but one we might all have to get more used to.
In my opinion, only on-going dialogue and negotiations will have any effect; moral outrage from whatever source will not ease this process. The Chinese government, like all governments before it, is going to do what it thinks is best for the Chinese state and people. This can be critiqued as the actions of a self-serving political entity, but I think this perspective misses the historical essence of Chinese politics and does a disservice to many of the people in government working to improve the living conditions and opportunities of Chinese people. China may, as it has done in the past, just slowly begin to retreat into itself. Having lived here for a few years and possessing a very superficial sense of Chinese history, I would say that is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility. Many Chinese themselves, at this present juncture, may even be comfortable with that scenario, but many would not. However, if we don’t believe that is necessarily good for us or them, then we might just have to go the extra mile to stop it happening.
Changes in individual behaviour or national culture seem to be either attained by aggression and war or they are worked on from the edges (whether from internal or external influences)- the former has neither legitimacy, value or a basic hope in humanity at its base – the latter has a chance. Google.cn or .com leaving China doesn’t do anything for the evolution of our integrated planetary concerns. Bite the bullet Google, sure up your security and hang on in there, that may really be an ethical stance to be proud of, you might also find by doing so you’ll take the Chinese people with you- which, if you’re bothered at all, might even mean a little profit. But surely, this is about more than that.
Come on Google, you’re the maan!
Tags: China News, Google China
The images are from Kashgar- here they link to the China News Page.
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