February 17, 2006 | posted by Michael Baxter in Uncategorized |

As we all know US foreign policy consistently applies morality before political expediency. On no occasion for example, has the US propped up corrupt regimes because it’s in their economic interests to do so. Therefore, we can say there wasn’t even a hint of hypocrisy in the US yesterday when members of a Congressional Sub committee grilled representatives from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco on their policies in China.

Google follows the motto of “do no evil” and yet California Representative Tom Lantos said to the executives from the companies being quizzed, “Your abhorrent activities in China are a disgrace I simply do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.”

Yahoo seems to be under the spotlight more than the others, because the data it recently provided to Chinese authorities led to the arrest of a human rights activist.

Google has been criticized for supplying a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market.

But the companies were quick to defend themselves. Michael Callahan, General Counsel for Yahoo said, “Ultimately U.S. companies in China face a choice: comply with Chinese law or leave.” He added, “I couldn’t sit in an office in California and tell a Chinese citizen in Beijing not to follow a lawful demand of the Chinese government.” Microsoft’s counsel said, “The benefits far outweigh the downside in terms of promoting freedom of information.”

For its part, Google argued that state censorship should be defined as a barrier of trade, another chip to bargain with in trade talks.

We confess to being a little suspicious of the US policy to China, and wonder whether it’s got more to with paranoia over China’s growing strength, which will ultimately see it overtake the US as the world’s premier superpower. That this will happen is inevitable. The question is, how do we ensure that China embraces western values of freedom in the mean time? We suspect the answer does not lie in criticising tech companies for trading in China. The Internet is the antithesis of censorship, and by providing China’s 110 million Internet users with access to some of its information, we suspect that ultimately ideas of freedom of expression will gradually seep through the information great wall.