Google’s announcement that it will stop restricting search results on its Chinese platform — a condition set when the Internet giant entered the Chinese market in 2006 — and the threat that it could pull out of China altogether if Beijing continues to launch cyber attacks for gathering information on human rights activists is a praiseworthy development. It shows that even large corporations that stand to make a fortune from the gigantic Chinese Internet market can abide by their principles when the state overreaches.
The decision may also have been self-interested, as the conditions imposed on Google for entry into China had tarnished its reputation, something that was put in sharp relief when Yahoo pulled out of China after data it gave the Chinese authorities resulted in the arrest of journalists. (Yahoo sold its China business to Alibaba Group [阿里巴巴] in 2005, while acquiring a 39 percent stake in Alibaba.)
Some commentators, including Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, have argued that Google’s battle with Beijing demonstrates that China has forever transformed the world and that, consequently, Google has already lost the fight.
“The Google model of a free and open Internet, an exemplar of the American idea of the future, cannot and will not prevail,” Jacques wrote in Newsweek last week. “China’s Internet will continue to be policed and controlled, information filtered, sites prohibited, noncompliant search engines excluded, and sensitive search words disallowed. And where China goes, others … will follow.”
This view is flawed because there is nothing teleological about authoritarianism, just as there is nothing teleological about democracy. Had the Internet existed when the Soviet Union was at its apex, would Jacques have made the same prediction, drawing on Russia’s centuries-old history of strong, centralized rule? Back then, did thinkers in the West argue that Moscow would forever alter the way we share information because the Soviet Union was censoring the media and arresting dissidents? Did we abandon dissident writers like Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milosz? Of course not.
In time, the Soviet Union, rife with contradictions and ossified by lack of freedoms, collapsed, and people like Havel were hailed as heroes.
China’s economy may be almost twice the size of the Soviet Union’s at its demise, and its population about six times as large, but this doesn’t mean the world will be more willing to accommodate Chinese authoritarianism than it did during the Cold War.
In fact, thanks to the ubiquity of electronic media and global travel, people today are more aware of what’s going on abroad, and are better equipped to access that information, than at any time. Even Chinese, who live under a regime seeking to control information, have a better chance of learning about the world than Czechs, Poles and Russians did under Soviet rule. And the thirst for that knowledge is equally strong. There is nothing in the Chinese character that makes them less inclined to seek the truth.
As China rises and its leadership shows no sign of liberalizing, the last thing we want to embrace is defeatism, believing that we can’t do anything about the impact this will have on our world. More than ever, people are starting to realize that China’s philosophy on freedom of expression is threatening our way of life. Ask Australians during the Melbourne International Film Festival, or Taiwanese when newspaper editors are fired as a result of pressure from Beijing.
Google’s decision is not capitulation. It is taking a stand for the liberties that the great majority of human beings cherish and aspire to. Let’s hope others follow Google’s lead.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
On today’s page, Masahiro Matsumura, a professor of international politics and national security at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, questions the viability and advisability of the government’s proposed “T-Dome” missile defense system. Matsumura writes that Taiwan’s military budget would be better allocated elsewhere, and cautions against the temptation to allow politics to trump strategic sense. What he does not do is question whether Taiwan needs to increase its defense capabilities. “Given the accelerating pace of Beijing’s military buildup and political coercion ... [Taiwan] cannot afford inaction,” he writes. A rational, robust debate over the specifics, not the scale or the necessity,
RSS