AT its most basic, censorship is a necessary social mechanism. For instance, people generally censor their comments to avoid causing offense to others. At a higher level, every country in the world exercises some form of legally enforced censorship, even in the so-called liberal democracies. People simply may not write or say or do whatever they want. There are constraints. In many European countries, for instance, it is a crime, punishable with imprisonment, to deny the Nazi Holocaust took place. Likewise expressions of racial bigotry can and do lead to prosecutions and often stiff penalties in many countries.
Censorship is, therefore, a reality, the nature of which will change from country to country. Outsiders may disagree with these legal constraints, but in the final analysis, it is not their business. It is incumbent on any foreigner coming to another country, especially for reasons of business, to respect the sensibilities of their host country, particularly those sensibilities that are enshrined in the local laws that deal with censorship.
Thus the behavior of the US software company Google in China is a puzzle. Five years ago it decided to expand its search-engine operations to this huge market and it set up an office in Beijing. The Chinese have strict censorship laws. In order to be granted its license to operate there, Google naturally had to agree to respect these. In particular, it committed to filter for its Chinese users all search results. Thus for instance, a search for “Tiananmen Square” would bring up very little if anything on the dramatic events of 1989, that saw Communist rule challenged in the very heart of the capital.
Five years on and Google has announced that it is no longer prepared to comply with Chinese censorship requirements. However, the reason given is that it has detected sophisticated cyber attacks on its e-mail service in what it says were unsuccessful attempts to access the e-mails of leading Chinese dissidents. This in itself is odd. It has to be presumed that intelligence services around the world, not least in the US, have been busy trying to penetrate e-mail accounts, including Google’s, as part of the fight against international terror. Google must have spotted this activity as well, but has never protested.
Even if there have been presumably officially-sponsored Chinese attacks on Google’s systems, this seems no good reason to throw over a commitment five years ago to honor Chinese censorship requirements. Google was prepared to accept the restrictions then, in the teeth of loud protests from the US liberal establishment. It is hard to see what has changed in the last five years in Beijing’s censorship rules. Google’s Chinese rival Baidu (whose shares soared when Google announced it was quitting) has since claimed that that Google was not generating the expected high profits out of its Chinese operation, perhaps because the majority of Chinese would rather use and advertise on the domestic search engine. If this is indeed the real reason for leaving, then maybe the US company’s managers might usefully try Googling the expression “Double-speak”.
