For China, Cyberspace is the New Political Frontier
| Posted: 2010-02-02 |
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By Antoaneta Bezlova* LONDON, Feb. 2 (Asia Media Forum) – In the acrimonious row between Google and the Chinese government over who sets the rules of the Internet game, Beijing has made it increasingly clear that cyberspace is the new frontier where the battle for world dominance will be played out. Almost three weeks after Google announced that it would stop the government directive of filtering its google.cn search results, Beijing’s refusal to tolerate any dissenting views and its revved-up media campaign to impose its own political views have now managed to tilt the scales at home in favour of Chinese censors. The country’s youth who only three weeks ago were firing salvos against China’s rigid censorship system and laying flowers in front of Google’s Beijing headquarters are now on the same side of the barricades with the censors — berating the world’s biggest search engine for its attempts to spread “information capitalism”. “Holding the banner of freedom of speech but seeking to gain profits that it could not gain the normal way – is this what we should be admiring?” wondered one netizen using the name Wanyou (meaning ‘net-friend’) of Google’s recent surprise defiance towards Beijing. “Now that the U.S. government has come to Google’s rescue we can clearly see what this is all about – a capitalist campaign to impose U.S. values and put down other cultures”. Such comments have dominated Internet forums (monitored by the government) and the media since U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cast China’s Internet censorship in late January as a threat to the global flow of information and called on Beijing to conduct a “transparent” investigation into attacks on American computers on Chinese soil. The rebuke came 10 days after Google dramatically announced that it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search portal, google.cn, and was considering quitting the Chinese market – the world’s biggest online community. The announcement came soon after Google fell prey to what it described as "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack". Reports say that China-based hackers in mid-December 2009 attempted to get into Google's software coding, as well as infiltrate the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Not only did the announcement stunned China’s internet generation. It created also an outpouring of sympathy for the company, rallying thousands of wire-savvy young people against the whims of Chinese internet censors. Ordinary people turned up in front of Google's offices in Beijing with flowers. After the initial shock of the news, the share price of the company, which in China has been squeezed by powerful domestic rivals, quickly rebounded. A survey of 14,000 internet users by the website china163.com found that 80 percent hoped Google would not leave China. For about a week netizens bemoaned the opaque nature of Chinese politics that created ever more rules of what is not allowed in cyberspace. Many openly expressed dismay at the reach and power of Chinese censors. “We have lost Twitter and YouTube, we can’t use Facebook in the mainland and it feels like we are living on another planet,” said Xingge, another blogger claiming to speak for many. Since 2009, which marked communist China’s 60th anniversary, a crackdown on dissent has seen scores of internet sites shut down and curbed. Mobile phone communications have been scanned for risqué messages and whiffs of dissent. One of the most influential investigative magazines, 'Caijing', was also forced to ditch its daring editor. Yet when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that China’s handling of the Internet was threatening to draw a new “information curtain” dividing the world, the mood changed. Abandoning the defence of freedom of speech and internet expression, yuppies and many intellectuals joined the government in delivering a blistering attack on the West for its “bullying tactics”. “As the global landscape is undergoing profound irreversible shifts, the calculated free-Internet scheme is just one step of a U.S. tactic to preserve its hegemonic domination,” Yan Xuetong, who heads the Institute of International Studies at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, was quoted in an article published in the Communist party-sanctioned newspaper 'Global Times'. An editorial in the same paper presented the Internet standoff as a clash of values between two very different world powers. Information from the West comes “loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead,” it said on Jan. 22. The clash has exposed a deeply ingrained perception in Chinese people that merges the government and the nation in one. Foreign criticism of the Chinese government is always viewed as insulting to the Chinese nation as well. “It comes from having too long [a] feudal history,” says Cao Yin, who works as an English interpreter. “Many ordinary people see the government as a successor to the emperor and the emperor is, or it was, a symbol of China’s power and influence in the past.” When China’s young wire generation challenges the government, it wants to do so on its own. It did so successfully last year when it forced Chinese censors to abandon a plan to equip all new personal computers sold in the country with a copy of Green Dam, an Internet-filtering software that could have been used to block both pornography and politically sensitive information. To the outside world, the most recent row between Google and Beijing has exposed a fundamental clash in values between China and other countries that thrives on an unrestricted flow of information. Google, which in 2006 agreed to censor its Chinese portal in order to gain access to the country’s 360 million internet users, argued like many other firms before it that its mere presence might help to liberalise the Middle Kingdom. But it has instead become the first big foreign company to break the silence over the compromises foreign businesses have to make to operate in the Chinese market. Inside China though, the internet row is now increasingly being portrayed as an imperialist ploy to restrain a resurgent China, playing into the hands of nationalistic sentiments. Those who in the beginning seemed to be shocked by the possibility of Google leaving China are now talking of the new internet century that is going to belong to China’s home-grown search engine company, Baidu. Even though Google’s market share climbed from 15 percent in mid-2006 to 31 percent today, the U.S. company is still lagging behind its Chinese rival. Baidu claims 64 percent of the market share today. “This is only the beginning of many more to come,” predicts business commentator Xu Lifan. “I think foreign companies became too spoiled during the last 30 years of China’s economic reform. They got the red carpet and favourable policies wherever they went and many forgot about the possibility of local competition. The time to remember is now.” (END/IPSAP/AMF/AB/LLC/010210) * * * |
