Home
Archive
Columnists
Video
Blogs
Discuss
About
Search
Donate
Advertise
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Register to Vote: Rock the Vote, powered by Working Assets Wireless
Advertisement
  • AlterNetYour turn

Support AlterNet
Do you value the information you're getting from AlterNet? Please show your support with a tax-deductible donation.


Feedback
Tell us how we're doing.

Capitalizing On Government Repression

By G. Pascal Zachary, In These Times. Posted December 8, 2005.


For American corporations in China, staying in business often means collaborating in -- and sometimes assisting -- governmental repression of citizens.

Share and save this post:
Digg iconDelicious iconReddit iconFark iconYahoo! iconNewsvine! iconFacebook iconNewsTrust icon

More stories by G. Pascal Zachary

Get AlterNet in
your mailbox!

 
Advertisement

Everyone I meet is afraid. The chief executive of one of China's largest hotel groups is afraid to complain to the police about the hustlers who sell fake watches outside the lobbies of his hotels. A Buddhist who runs a network of factories is afraid to speak openly about the Chinese occupation of Tibet. A sports marketing official, one of the agents for China's basketball stars, is afraid to speak out against misguided policies of the national sports system.

What is unusual about these people is not that they are afraid; many people in China are. What is unusual about these people is that they are Americans doing business in China -- some even doing business successfully. What they fear, of course, is the same thing that China's people fear: the arbitrary power of government.

For Americans doing business in China, it is a short step between fear and collaboration, as I recently found during a two-week visit to Shanghai and Beijing, the two leading destinations in China for American "expats."

My first meeting in Shanghai was not with Americans, but with Chinese nationals working for them. On a Sunday afternoon I sat in a shiny Starbucks near the city's central park, tucked into the rear corner of the shop, drinking coffee with five young people (three men and two women) who each work for a large American company in China. They all agreed that working for an American company had benefits over employment with a Chinese company. There was more openness at work, more emphasis on performance and more room to take chances. But one thing was the same: If they were caught criticizing the government, or even breaking the petty rules that govern their social lives -- such as the ban on meeting in formal associations that might touch on political and social issues -- the American company would not intervene to help them.

A few days later, an American who used to work for Nike explains to me why he won't stick his neck out for the Chinese or even his own principles: fear of retaliation. The American has his own sports marketing company, organizes amateur basketball tournaments throughout China and even advises China's version of the NBA. He knows Yao Ming, star of the Houston Rockets, personally. When talk comes around to the poor performance of China's international basketball team, the American offers an explanation: China's government officials are ruining Yao Ming and other top players by making them play year-round for China's national team, often sacrificing time for much-needed rest and skills building. The American knows of what he speaks, since he is the agent for the country's leading point guard who, like Yao Ming, is a victim of the government's sports policies.

I say that this is a shame, and the American agrees. But he isn't about to campaign for better treatment of these stars. In his office we are surrounded by posters of leading Chinese athletes. He points to a poster of Wang Zhizhi, a tall Chinese man who backed up Shaquille O'Neal last year for the Miami Heat. Wang rebelled against the Chinese government by refusing to play for the national team at last year's Olympics. He is now persona non grata, not only to the Chinese government, but the sports marketing establishment here. This American won't touch him, nor will anyone else, out of fear of antagonizing the Chinese government and losing lucrative deals.

Free Speech Be Damned

The sports marketer is guilty of keeping his mouth shut. But other Americans actively assist the Chinese government in the maintenance of its repressive regime. Even as I talk to the sports marketer, Microsoft is concocting an Orwellian policy for its new Chinese version of MSN, a news site and search engine. Microsoft has decided (and publicly confirmed this summer) that anyone in China doing a search containing the words "freedom" or "democracy" will be shown a message explaining that those words are banned and the requested search query will not be processed.

Now, Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world and its founder Bill Gates has spent billions of dollars on a foundation to reduce global inequalities in health and education. And yet his own company is so intimidated by China's government that terms basic to free expression are banned from its search engine.

American collaboration gets even uglier than that, however. In September Internet company Yahoo admitted that its employees in China assisted the government in making a case against a dissident journalist named Shi Tao, jailed since April, apparently for revealing information about a crackdown by the Communist Party.

In response to a question about the journalist's fate at a Beijing Internet conference in September, Jerry Yang, an American co-founder of Yahoo, confirmed that his company had helped the Chinese government arrest and prosecute Shi Tao. Yang didn't give specifics, but Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based advocacy group, has said that Yahoo officials in China helped the government track Shi Tao down using the IP address from which he read his Yahoo e-mail account.


Digg!

G. Pascal Zachary teaches journalism at Stanford University and is a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He is the author of The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »


Advertisement

 

Comments Turn comments off sitewide Give us feedback »
Comments closed.
The comments for this story have been closed. Thank you to everyone who participated.
View:
Thank you for the article.
Posted by: Samantha Vimes on Dec 8, 2005 3:51 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I've read plenty about America's dependence on China, but your article makes it clear that it's not a one way street, and gives me hope that things will work out without disaster.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Wha?!........................
Posted by: sausage on Dec 8, 2005 5:43 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
"The Americans, with their vastly diversified economy..." ROFLMAO

Let's see what's "Made In USA" these days.....guns....crappy cars and SUVs...tires...corn and soy beans, we grow a lot of those...soft drinks...furniture, we still have a thriving furniture industry, don't we?...oh, oh! growing industry ethanol, tired in with corn...

Gee, I guess if you take out all stock and bond investment, business mergers, insurance and "marketing" there ain't much left.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» We are all guilty Posted by: Brucewxx
BUSH AND CO HAVE BEEN TO CHINA AND LIKE WHAT THEY SEE
Posted by: Jeffersonista on Dec 8, 2005 6:22 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
BUSH AND CO LIKE WHAT THE REPRESSION AND TOTAL POLITCAL CONTROL THEY SEE IN CHINA, AND USE EVERY WAKING MOMENT TO MOLD OUR DEMOCRACY INTO THE SAME FASCIST TOTALITARIAN HORROR.

BUY SLAVE PRODUCED GIFTS FOR CHRISTMAS!

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Remember when WalMart bragged 'Made in USA'?
Posted by: Bic Pentameter on Dec 8, 2005 8:29 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
About 15 or so years ago there were TV ads in which WalMart bragged about having more american made products. I don't know to whom they were comparing themselves, but they've altogether dropped that pretense. At the time, though, they tried to make it look almost patriotic to shop at WalMart. Then rumours began to circulate that labels were being changed. I'm inclined to think that was a miscommunication, and that products were gradually replaced with imports bearing other marks of origin.

But, we can always represent each other in court, sell each other real estate, listen to each other's heart, cut each other's hair, wait on each other's table and entertain each other. We can lighten construction standards for commercial space and replace those structures every 10 or 15 years instead of 20.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Buying Chinese
Posted by: coyote on Dec 8, 2005 3:55 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I personally avoid purchasing anything made in China. I know everything isn't made by prison slaves and seven year old girls. But how do you tell the difference? Sticking to principal is difficult sometimes, like finding that perfect wallet I've been searching for and discovering it's made in China. The worst blow came last week when I went to replce my UGGS and discovered they are now made in China. WTF??? That really threw me, I can't live without UGG Boots. Or so I thought, a little research turned up a good many American and New Zealand makers of Shearling Boots.
And less expensive too.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

I call bullshit.
Posted by: ttmrichter on Dec 8, 2005 5:11 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The article was very convincing and believable until the anecdote at the end blew the author's credibility sky-high.

Four and a half years I've lived in China in various locales. I've seen all sorts of abuse. This is why I believed (note the tense!) the stories proferred. Then came the double-whammy.

Whammy #1: "Chinese keyboards." There is no such thing -- unless you go to Taiwan where cryptic symbols (Zhuyin) are added to the latinate keyboard. Note that: added. It's still a QWERTY keyboard. On the mainland proper, however, keyboards are pure-on QWERTY. In four and a half years (and about a thousand net bars including ones in Beijing and Shanghai) I've not seen a single keyboard that wasn't a QWERTY. Why? Because both the Hanyu Pinyin system at the core of most IMEs and the Wubi system at the core of the fastest IME system (for a trained operator) use the latinate alphabet. Get a fact as fundamental as this wrong and the rest of the story falls into doubt.

Whammy #2: "Big Black Book of Foreign Logins". I refer again to four and a half years in this country and thousands of net bars. I have seen one net bar that required registration to use--the one in the Shanghai public library. And that one required everybody to register, not just the foreign users. I can't stress this enough. In four and a half years I only ever found one net bar that required registration, and that required everyone to register. So a story of a net bar that suddenly (and in a contrived bit of convenient timing, no less!) required just the foreigner to register (after helping said foreigner with a mythical "Chinese keyboard"...)? Zero credibility.

And two lies in rapid succession at the end makes me call bullshit on the whole article.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: I call bullshit. Posted by: geli
» RE: I call bullshit. Posted by: ttmrichter
» RE: bull -kjc Posted by: kjc