Ethan Gutmann's experience with China progressed like an ill-fated love affair: initial attraction, infatuation, disillusionment and, finally, separation.
In 2003 he wrote a book called Losing the New China which reveals the ugly underbelly of the US corporate expat community in Beijing and how it's helping China become exactly what the US -- and Taiwan -- fear most: more repressive and strategically stronger.
Gutmann, who studied international relations at Columbia University and worked as an investigative reporter in Washington, will likely never be granted a Chinese visa again due to the unfavorable light cast on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in his book. But that hasn't stopped him from making trips to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where many are interested in the story he has to tell.
PHOTO COURTESY OF AUTHOR
It was Gutmann's first visit to Taiwan back in the early 1990s that originally inspired his inte-rest in Asia. He came to Taipei on vacation to visit his wife, who was studying Chinese. "I got here and she was very busy, so I started walking and I had a street map. Of course I couldn't read anything, but I could match the characters on the street map to the street signs," Gutmann recalled. "I had never seen an Asian economy in action. The constant stimulation of the buying and selling instinct was ... intoxicating and it made me feel optimistic about the world."
In the late 1990s he joined his wife again in Asia -- China, this time -- full of optimism and itching to get in the middle of things. Gutmann soon received a jarring introduction to Chinese "hypernationalism," as he calls it, when NATO aircraft mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, resulting in street protests and a bitterly anti-American climate back in Beijing.
What shocked him "wasn't the anti-Americanism, it was the fact that there was this completely unquestioning attitude in the student body, exactly 10 years after Tiananmen Square," Gutmann said. "The conformity had worked, the propaganda had worked." This experience is what first got Gutmann writing. His account of this period would later become the first chapter of his book. He knew that becoming a whistle-blower would end his prospects in China, and he had just started working for a public relations consulting firm -- a job he did not wish to compromise.
"I had no intention of writing the book until after I came back from China. I wanted to learn about business while I was there ... Over time working as a business consultant I started to live a double life, in a sense: I wasn't thinking about the book exactly, but I was storing up the information ... everyday I'd watch my firm make a compromise or a company make a compromise." For example, the firm worked with an individual who was marketing Internet spy software on the promise that it could be used to catch Falun Gong members.
Gutmann writes of his experience with the firm, "It all looked respectable, yet on my way up, I increasingly felt like a fake. The sense that something was wrong started with my business card ... My title, "senior counselor," was identical to that of two highly respected former congressmen and the former national security adviser to former US president Ronald Reagan. But it wasn't just me. The more I learned about commerce in Beijing, the more I scratched under the veneer of order, hierarchy and sobriety, the more it began to resemble a looking-glass world." The widespread inflation of skills, business failure and systematic use of bribes disturbed Gutmann.
As his job with the firm was winding down, Gutmann started knocking on doors and doing interviews, including one with a top Cisco engineer, who "couldn't confirm or deny that his company had built special firewalls" for China's "Big Brother" Internet, Gutmann said.
China's Internet is the largest controlled network in the world. According to a 2002 Harvard Law report (available at cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china), more than 50,000 Web sites out of a sample of 204,012 sites on subjects ranging from Tibet to sex and health were blocked from at least one point in China. Of the sites blocked, 3,284 were based in Taiwan. Forty-three percent of the top 100 sites returned on a Google search for the keyword "Taiwan" were inaccessible from China.
Cisco recently sold a new system called Policenet to China.
The product allows law enforcement authorities to access any citizens' Web surfing history and retrieve e-mails from the last 60 days.
Gutmann said Cisco went from denying Policenet's existence to denying any wrongdoing, despite a US law forbidding companies from licensing crime-stopping technology to repressive regimes. At least one Congressman has already proposed Congreesional hearing on the subject of Cisco's product Policenet.
According to Gutmann, not all of the firewalls China uses to control access to the Internet were made by Cisco.
While Gutmann admits that China would have filtered Internet content with or without Cisco's (and other US companies') contributions, he believes Beijing could not have been so successful at censoring access were it not for outside assistance.
A refusal of support from US companies would have left a lot more holes and opportunities for the free and anonymous exchange of information -- something China desperately needs, said Gutmann.
"There is a lack of political maturity in China. It is not an unsolvable problem -- it is something that can be solved in a couple of years," Gutmann said. "But what is required is a massive bloodletting, an emotional catharsis about the issues that have already taken place: the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square ... these are bottled-up, terrible crimes and no one can talk about them, not really. The discussion boards are controlled and the Internet is the natural place for this to happen. It has to be anonymous, to some extent, for it to happen."
Taiwan should be at the vanguard of China's Internet liberation, Gutmann said, because the two countries share a common linguistic and cultural heritage. "There has to be uncontrolled dialogue between Taiwan and China, and it has to be on the Internet for the Chinese to understand that democracy is not just cat fights in parliament ... that democracy has some other meaning than just ridiculous spectacle."
Gutmann touched on an issue that could be more worrisome than censorship of the Internet: the research and development plants that top US tech companies are setting up in China. According to Gutmann, this means that the US can no longer remain half a step ahead of China technologically, and the US' strategic edge will also be lost as much of the research being done has military applications.
"The idea was that free trade with China would turn China from a strategic competitor to a strategic partner, but the truth is that American business is not bringing positive political change in China," Gutmann said. "They're not there to change China, but just to do whatever the CCP wants."
When asked about his view of the Unocal ordeal that saw the China National Offshore Oil Corporation's bid to buy the American-owned company scuppered due to intense US government scrutiny, Gutmann said while it might not have been the most logical way for Washington to make a stand (after all, only 1 percent of the US' oil was in question), the outcome should encourage US businesspeople in China to take a step back from the CCP's demands and say, "We're really under a lot of pressure from Washington."
"Unocal shows that Congress is watching," Gutmann concluded. "Taiwan should be watching, too."
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