The Alphaville Herald

Op/Ed: The Problem with China

by Jessica Holyoke on 07/03/08 at 5:56 am

by Jessica Holyoke

I was reading on the BLT, the Blog of the Legal Times, about a mainland Chinese human rights lawyer who was beaten by police due to his advocacy for residents campaigning against a high tech railroad that would cut through middle class areas. In reading about Zheng Enchong, I was reminded about the ongoing struggles around me regarding what to do to help Chinese dissidents.

Back in August, Prokofy Neva reported in these pages that he attempted to persuade Phillip Rosedale to never turn over dissident information. Rosedale waffled on that point and did not make a commitment. There was an ensuing forum war mostly between myself and Prokofy regarding what should a corporation do in case of being requested to turn over dissident information.

The most public example of an internet company turning over dissident information is Yahoo in the case of Xiaoning et al v. Yahoo! Inc. et al. . Filed in Federal court in the Northern District of California, Wang Xiaoning, his wife and another journalist sued Yahoo because the Yahoo subsidiary based in Hong Kong turned over that information. After court documents were filed and Congressional hearings were held in Washington, D.C., where Yahoo’s President and General Counsel were made to apologize to the Plaintiffs, Yahoo settled the case. But after all that happened, only 20% of Yahoo’s shareholders voted to change Yahoo’s policy so that this never happens again.

Now of course, Yahoo had offices located in Hong Kong, where people like law professor Don Clarke have stated that mainland China has no jurisdiction, even though Yahoo HK had offices in Beijing. And its not like the Lindens have an office in Beijing (RedlineChina states that they have a Beijing office. There is nothing definite at the Linden Lab website. RTMAsia is helping to advertise Second Life more in China, or at least they were back in November.)

Talking to people about the problem, you see the conversation always turn to the dissidents. In fact, when I proposed a symposium to the Second Life Bar Association in order to raise the question, the push back I got was that only Human Rights Groups or only Chinese dissident groups need to be represented on the panels. However, the dissidents are the third parties in this arrangement. The true beneficiary of the symposium is the company being asked to turn over the information. When asked why am I not siding with the dissidents, the accusation is always that I’m siding with the PRC, and never for the company being imposed upon. I have yet to see a Human Rights Watch or a Reporters without Borders state that they would have helped Yahoo in their defense if they were attacked or retaliated against by China for defending Xiaoning.

While I’m not sure about the legal reason why Yahoo and Linden Lab have so far refused to state a policy to never turn over dissident information, or at least Google and Microsoft said that they would turn over dissident information so long as the PRC goes through a US court, the business reason is fairly clear.

Because I’ve been noticing things like Lonely Planet being boycotted for publishing a tourism guide of Burma, but not for taking out information regarding China. I’ve noticed Rupert Murdoch pleading with the PRC government to be allowed to operate in China. But the one thing I haven’t noticed is a boycott of Yahoo over their policy.

In the US right now, you can’t avoid China made products. But even the most ardent of Human Rights supporters have yet to give up their Yahoo accounts based on their beliefs. That’s the business reason. Turn over the dissident, you might pay some damages but business continues as usual. Do not turn over the dissident, you might lose access to 110 million users. Even with the Great Firewall of China, if the point of the internet is ease of use, then why figure out ways to go around the firewall and risk getting accused of wrong doing if you could use Hipipihi, the new virtual world, or Baidu, the main Chinese search engine instead?

If you look at the past and how Soviet dissidents were treated or how boycotts helped end apartheid, you notice that in neither of those two cases were the media partially controlled by outside sources and nor was Most Favored Nation trading status given to the countries we wanted to change. China is different than what has gone before. We aren’t isolating them. We are actively engaging them, giving them business and the US government is borrowing money from them. What has gone before is not going to work again.

Which brings us back around to the Congressional Hearings and why they are a good thing. If Legislation gets past both the Chinese lobbyists and the Business lobbyists, then forcing a company to not do business with a Human Rights abuser or simply making it more worthwhile for businesses to lobby for Human Rights changes are good things. A corporation is an amoral legal entity whose sole purpose is to make money. Right now, campaigning for Human Rights, unless they donate to a charitable group, does not make them money. If, in order to follow the law, they have to campaign for Human Rights, that’s a good thing.

So while I’m still advocating for the SLBA symposium to either show that there is no legal consequence for not following a foreign country’s laws – hello VAT – or that there are ways to defend against how a foreign country’s law applies – welcome back Free Speech – the other reason, the business reason is important to keep in mind.

If you feel strongly about the turning over of dissident information by any service provider, then you need to let that provider know that you are unwilling to continue to use their service. Hitting the provider where it counts is more important to change their ways than it is to hit the foreign country. But that’s the true question, what are you willing to give up for your beliefs? Are you willing to kill your Second Life so that someone else might live?