One result was immediate: Young Chinese have been visiting Google’s headquarters in Beijing to deposit flowers and pay their respects.
China promptly tried to censor the ensuing debate about its censorship, but many Chinese Twitter users went out of their way to praise Google. One from Guangdong declared: “It’s not Google that’s withdrawing from China, it’s China that’s withdrawing from the world.”
Cynics say Google tried to turn a business setback (it lags in the Chinese market behind a local search engine, Baidu) into a bid to burnish its brand. Whatever the motivations, it marks a refreshing contrast to Yahoo assisting the Chinese government in sending four dissidents to prison for terms of up to 10 years.
“In the 20 years I’ve been doing this work, I can’t think of anything comparable,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has enjoyed remarkable success in urging China to free dissidents. Kamm, a former business leader, argues that Western companies could do far more to project their values.
Google announced its decision after a sophisticated Chinese attempt to penetrate the Gmail addresses of dissidents. The episode and the resulting flap highlight two important points about China.
The first is that Beijing is increasingly devoting itself to cyberwarfare. This is a cheap way to counter American dominance in traditional military fields. If the U.S. and China ever jostle with force, Beijing may hit us not with missiles but with cyberinfiltrations that shut down the electrical grid, disrupt communications and tinker with the floodgates of dams.
Moreover, China’s leaders aren’t keeping their cyberarsenal in reserve. They seem to be using it aggressively already.
A major coordinated assault on computers of the Dalai Lama, foreign embassies and even foreign ministries was uncovered last year and traced to Chinese hackers. The operation targeted computers in more than 100 countries and was so widespread that Western intelligence experts believe it was organized by the Chinese government, although there is no proof of that.
A second point is that China is redrawing the balance between openness and economic efficiency. The architect of China’s astonishingly successful economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, clenched his teeth and accepted cellphones, computers and lawyers because they were part of modernization.
Yet in the last few years, President Hu Jintao has cracked down on the Internet, independent lawyers and journalists. Hu is intellectually brilliant, but seems to have no vision for China 20 years from now.
Instead, vision and leadership in China have come from its Netizens, who show none of the lame sycophancy that so many foreigners do. In their Twitter photos, many display yellow ribbons to show solidarity with Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese writer recently sentenced to 10 years in prison.
China’s Netizens scale the Great Firewall of China withl private networks and American-based proxy servers like Freegate. (The United States should support these efforts with additional server capacity.)
When I lived China in the 1990s, an early computer virus would pop up on the screen and ask: Do you like Li Peng? (He was then the widely disliked hard-line prime minister.) If you said you didn’t like Li Peng, the virus disappeared and did no harm. If you expressed support for him, it tried to wipe out your hard drive.
Eventually, I think, a combination of technology, education and information will end the present stasis in China. In a conflict between the Communist Party and Google, the party will win in the short run. But in the long run, I’d put my money on Google.
Nicholas D. Kristof writes for The New York Times.