Sunday, February 19, 2006
Editorial: American companies aid Chinese oppression
But congressional scolds should remember that they are the ones who made trade easier by granting China 'most-favored nation' status.
From the RoundTable blog
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What price do American information technology companies pay to operate in China?
As a congressional hearing last week made clear, it is a steep one: Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have allowed themselves to become complicit in government censorship and crackdowns on dissidents.
The companies came under well-deserved criticism at the hearings.
"These captains of industry should have been developing new technologies to bypass the sickening censorship of government and repugnant barriers to the Internet," scolded U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif.
But there is plenty of criticism to go around. As Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., noted, Congress itself had approved and recently extended China's "most-favored nation" trade status.
Wexler asked this legitimate question: If China's human rights record is supposed to be an overriding concern for those doing business with the nation, shouldn't it also have been a priority for the U.S. government that eased trading restrictions with the authoritarian nation?
America made a conscious decision to improve relations with China as a trading partner in the hope that, eventually, it might lead to more openness in China's communist government.
As the executives for those companies pointed out, the U.S. government can do far more than they can to promote human rights in other countries.
Other U.S. companies that trade with China face difficult decisions, too. Forced labor is still quite common in China. Though companies have taken steps to ensure products they import from China aren't made by slave labor, there is no guarantee.
But tech companies face a different kind of challenge. When Google launched a search portal in China, it agreed to block searches for certain terms, like "democracy," "Tiananmen Square" and other topics Chinese censors would not allow.
Microsoft shut down the site of a popular dissident blogger at China's request.
And, most disturbingly, a Yahoo subsidiary turned over e-mail information to the government that resulted in the imprisonment of a dissident.
American companies cross an unacceptable line when they essentially become agents of an authoritarian regime.
What is the alternative? As Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said, if no U.S. tech company did business in China, "Does it get better? Is it less repressive? Does China move forward? I don't think so."
Before members of Congress get too self-righteous, they should ask themselves whether the U.S. government has done everything it can to encourage change in China.
