Conferring Legitimacy: The Problem of Fellow-Travelling Corporations in China
Yes, I see the Herald is bloviating about this topic again of Chinese dissidents versus Western companies and the Chinese government. Mr. Jesse Har-Ang (guessing he's male, Asian, not-yet-passed-the-bar) is taking the side of the Chinese government again, evidently for cultural or economic reasons, it's hard to tell with this anonymous avatar hiding behind the moniker "Jessica Holyoke".
More worrisome is Michael Arrington's virtuoso performance on TV and twitter links the other day, where he manages to pirouette about 180 degrees in a dance with Charlie Rose, appearing to look oh-so-concerned about Yahoo selling Chinese dissidents down the river, and then, while nobody really could notice after having registered his faux-knitted brows, saying that well, companies had to have an eye on the market.
Basically, that's Mr. Jesse's concept: what about the corporations? Don't they have business interests. Blah blah.
Indeed, I did confront Philip Rosedale for his waffling on the Chinese issue with BBC. At least when Arrington waffles, he knows how to keep his brows in rigid faux-knitted formation. "Terrible, terrible," he clucks about Yahoo when Rose conjures up the issue of how Yahoo execs had to be dragged before a Congressional committee. Yet Arrington doesn't articulate ANY position ANY different than Yahoo's -- and his performance is about distracting from that fact.
Philip made it seem like this was just a problem Yahoo got itself into because it didn't have a way to create local versions of its service or have hook-ups to grids in flexible ways or whatever it is Philip imagines as the future distributed world. Robin Harper showed some more spine in dealing with this, as Mr. Jesse knows, because she said that LL would not give out its customers' information. And that's what someone in the comments suggested: why would you turn over to the Chinese government *a goddamn thing* if you are a U.S. company in the U.S. and your customer is accessing your U.S. servers? Hell no. Let them get a legitimate subpoena, and so on.
Of course, LL will get around this by having their localizing service, their "grid-level partner", an Asian company that specializes in helping Westerners enter Asia, take the rap. So that sort of company will make the decision to turn over the information on the dissident, not Linden Lab in San Francisco, and that way, like some of the fabulous famous designers, they can say that they don't hire sweat-shop labour, but that some...supplier does, in the chain. Deniability.
Underlying Arrington's response, and Mr. Jesse's, is the idea that a corporation has to get all thinky about this and say soberly that they understand the issues, but they have to be concerned about their market. Inevitably, by casting Chinese dissidents and their supporters as shrill and extremist, these pro-government supporters then portray companies as mature, pragmatic, balancing the options, blah blah. In fact, the most common argument you hear in these debates is the perestroika gambit, that you can -- and should -- first have economic reform (perestroika) before you have glasnost (free media) and that this can and should be pulled off, if only these pesky protesters will stop demanding everything instantly, and thus foreclosing the more slow and gradual move to political liberty that is supposed to follow economic liberty.
Why, China is the fastest growing blah blah blah. Why, they have broadband and Internet cafes and games and they will be taking over everything. How could you NOT sell a virtual world to China? I mean, are you daft? You would harm your business? Blah.
Well...who says that it would be good for business to expand into China *anyway*? This isn't going to be without its risks and costs.
And I've seen over the years that reputable businesses can take on board human rights concerns, and it can be woven into a long-term pragmatic view of the market, as well. Nobody says you HAVE to grow in a climate where in the future, you may find yourself on the wrong side of history.
A company can reason smartly that these communists will not always be in power. Where are communists always in power except, oh, North Korea or your sociology faculty in your college? It's not the norm to have communists stay in power. Everywhere, they are overthrown. Where they aren't overthrown, they die...their brothers take over and make milder versions of the regime...gradually younger people come in, and it begins to look more liberal and more flexible. In fact, you could argue, China has already gone down the road of becoming a more "flexible and liberal" communism.
A company can also reason that out of the various dissident movements, some will take power. There will be some in the parliament. To be associated with the old regime -- the regime that tortured them -- why, in the new dispensation, it might cost them their permit to do business, or worse, subject them to scrutiny for collusion with the regime under a new more democratic and free parliament.
Oh, you say, a gigantic company can't think of these long-term poltiical possibilities, they have to barrel in and get into markets wherever there are people, anyway?
Oh, they do? Says who? Do they really have a market when they have to step on some of their customers to pick up others? Isn't that going to be remembered, and have some long-term consequences?
Philip Rosedale wants to offload the responsibility for reporting on dissidents to Chinese informers in the local companies and local users. They will use the Linden-made tools (like this new one now where you report all offenses directly to the sim owner, and not Linden Lab!) to enforce the police state. Well, that's how it is with technology. Siemens equipment sat on the Soviet border and still sits on borders in the none-too-free successor states. So, increasingly activists ask questions about this, make films, confront stock-holders, etc.
There is no reason to think that the human rights movement, which is constantly growing, is going to diminish, become less concerned, less funded, or less widespread, and if anything, it will pick up more of the features of the environmental movement, looking for policies of corporate responsibility as a means to enforce rights protection just as much as laws by governments.
Do corporations really want to be constantly shaking loose demonstrators who will keep reminding them of their corporate responsibility? The corporations took up environmental concerns, after a fashion, to a greater or lesser degree both to burnish their images and limit their liability to litigation. In time, they will do the same over human rights concerns; indeed, they already do.
There are companies that pass on the opportunity to expand their markets to oppressive regimes. They wait. They are even friendly to oppositions because they take the long view. In time, they've been rewarded; the new governments don't forget them. You don't *have* to expand a market; you can show up your competitor as having done so at the cost of morality.
"Jessica" at the Herald imagines that Yahoo's vote of only 20 percent shareholders in favour of taking the moral position "means something". I don't see that it is a fair or informed vote, nor does it take into account all factors Yahoo might be facing.
"Jessica" imagines that dissidents are "third parties," by which he means that they are not the two major parties in the moral drama: a) the government of China or b) the Western corporations.
But...that is laughably short-sighted. All over the world -- in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the "first parties" -- the governments in power -- that supposedly had the right to marginalize and turn into "third parties" the dissidents -- were removed from power. Whether Chile or South Africa or Poland. The fact that this decade's trend doesn't quite have the wind of democracy at its back as the 1980s or 1990s did isn't relevant; the trend is clear, and it's one that any long-term "market watcher" would have to think about: do I really want to piss off gadzillions of the people in this country by helping to jail a beloved dissident figure just so I can "expand my market" along with these cronies of this corrupt government?
One of the silly things that people who want to push their support of the Chinese government down your throats is to tell you that you are hypocritical if your kids are now wearing Chinese-made shoes that you bought at K-Mart's. Like...you're supposed to deprive some poor Chinese shoe factory worker of a job over your wish to support dissidents? And...Suddenly, these communist pro-government supporters are flag-waiving consumer boycotters, recognizing the value of a good old-fashioned consumer boycott!
But of course, they only try to use other people's morals to shame them, they don't sincerely adopt these morals themselves.
And the way to deal with the Chinese problem, as anyone knows, is not to try to tackle it through a consumer boycott of cheap Chinese-made goods. Not even poisoned goods causing damage to health or environment will get a boycott going these days! Boycotts don't work, symbolically feel-good though they may be. They didn't even work completely on South Africa, really, as there were too many forces undercutting it.
There might be another kind of boycott that Americans concerned about Chinese human rights abuses could try to get going, and that is a bar on all Chinese students studying in the US. Now that would get their attention. And that middle class of people, the more affluent Chinese studying abroad but who remain politically quiescent, neutral, uninvolved with the problems of their own country, might be forced to connect up the dots.
Because the very reason that these people aren't dissidents, and aren't pressuring their government en masse is because...the government lets off steam by having the valve of massive studying and employment abroad.
Pull the plug on that, and you might get to concentrate the minds of first parties and "third parties' wonderfully. Even just a reduction or slowing of visas to make a point would have a far, far greater impact than something like an Olympic boycott (which is seen as harming the Olympics or America's team, and not the actors of the Chinese government one wishes to change).
Yet I would never favour trying to block scholars or workers from free travel to the US. I find that sort of mentality, that some British have tried to apply to Israel, to be disgraceful -- you cannot call yourself a liberal and be for the blocking of the free flow of people and ideas across frontiers.
Still, one can take advantage of the fact that there are so many Chinese working in the US to have the conversation about China's role in the world, and its oppression of the kind of values that Chinese come to the US in search of when they come to study or work. To raise it on campuses and in workplaces. Of course, people fear retaliation against their families back home. But even just having *that* conversation up close and personal, one on one, which most people never do, helps you put the picture into focus better: why are we expanding our market into a place that terrorizes students abroad and makes them afraid to talk in a free country less their relative-hostages suffer retaliation back home?
Why would our company need to grow *at that cost*? At that expense? Not just individual dissidents here or there, that someone can always talk themselves into disbelieving, but more ordinary people?
Mr. Har Ang is also ignorant about MFN. The Jackson-Vanik amendment was exactly what was put into place to try to influence Soviet policy about emigration, and also influence Romania and other states with a communist regime. In fact, it worked.
It doesn't matter if the current posture toward China is Nixonian, even borrowing money. There will always be forces to raise the specter of an MFN type of regime, and they will have some traction.
Here's where Arrington, BTW, seemed to be totally generating confusion. Basically, his "message" broadcast through Charlie Rose (the new media tycoons are only to happy to harness old media phony down-home types like Rose on public TV when they need to) was that the tekkies are going to influence the elections and have "their" candidate, well, just because, because they deserve to, because they are everywhere and have millions of people reading their blogs or going on their Facebooks or whatever.
So...they will pick candidates on the basis of their positions. And this will involve positions on "net neutrality" (read: download hog favouritism lol) above all, but also about "China".
Arrington doesn't even have to explain what he *wants* the Chinese policy to do; he doesn't even have to parse what Obama or Hilary or McCain *think* about China (and I'll bet they don't even know themselves, when it comes to the Yahoo issue, they'll waffle as much as Philip). All he has to do is protect concern, faux that it may be, and drop the tech-memes: a) China is a campaign issue (it isn't); b) we think tech companies have to be nice to China and do business with them if they want to survive in the market (they don't...remember, we're dealing with tech-memes here!)
Mr. Har Ang tries to hoist liberals by their own petard by asking -- with utter malicious glee and insincerity, of course -- whether anyone is willing to give up their Second Life to save a Chinese dissident. It's a patently false presentation of the issue, because a) consumer boycotts don't work to change governments, even if they can change companies, and companies doing business with oppressive governments have the power of governments and b) dissidents don't successfully get saved in this manner.
No, what's important to do is to keep up the moral condemnation of this government that oppresses dissenters, and to keep it loud and proud, and to keep the focus squarely on those two parties, the Chinese government and their people, and not let it be distracted to methods abroad.
The focus should be to reach out to Chinese bloggers and dissidents writing about these issues. To interview them with new-media tools that circumvent censorship. To consciously put them on panels and workshops and go around the officially-approved Chinese agenda -- to deliberately disavow this imposed "third party" status and nod to the future, when they are parties of the first party when there won't be just one Party.
That's what Mr. Jesse hates more than anything, because it turns around the issue and puts it morally where it belongs: legitimizing the dissidents, who definitely need that legitimacy, and de-legitimizing the government, which uses nasty tactics to silent dissenters.
See, Mr. Jesse would like to do *anything* -- anything at all! -- to de-legitimize liberals caring about Chinese dissidents. He can do that best by using "their own medicine" on them and guilt-tripping them with attacks on their credibility as non-boycotters of a service doing business with the regime. Ignore those Bolshevik tactics as the silly things they are. Keep stepping around the robots. Keep mentioning the names of the prisoners, raising their cases, asking the moral questions of those really in a position to use leverage -- companies, not individual consumers.
That means putting the legitimacy where it belongs: on the Chinese dissident, and on principles. In fact, it doesn't pay even to become too wrapped up in a particular case or instance like religious sects because this, too, can backfire on you as either the sects themselves, or the manipulative regime, try to accentuate their non-liberal principals to discredit *you*. Always remember where the legitimacy belongs in this equation: on the principles, on those who are victims, on those who help them. Not on the governments and their fellow-travellers among companies worried about markets.
Finally, Mr. Har-Ang rants about the business reason (holy hush) for dumping dissidents down the drain. Profit and market. I've explained why these are false idols for the long term, but it also is important to reject any notion that this wannabee lawyer implies with an invocation of "the law". Chinese "law" that puts bloggers in jail or punishes relatives of dissenters and dissenters themselves aren't just laws, and are not what the civilized world means by "the rule of law". The rule of law is something very poorly taught in law schools, which tend to lead students like Mr. Jesse into abject dependency on literalisms.
These things can take time. There's no guarantee that they work. But we've seen successful models in the past. And the main thing to do when you face a daunting opponent in a situation where he has all the strength and all the media on his side is *not to confer legitimacy*. You may not be able to mount a boycott. You may not put a dent in his propaganda by rebutting it. But when all else fails, you can *refuse to confer legitimacy* on governments and corporations that betray dissidents punished for freedom of speech.
People waffle on this issue because it is a tough question without an apparent easy answer. Regardless of our views of the repression of freedoms in China, the Western economies have become linked to it as much as it is linked to the oil producing counties. Self interest often overrides values: the discomfort of more expensive goods trumps any feelings of misgivings about "that far away place where the stuff comes from".
Even if one does step away from the self interest though, I wonder what one *should* be doing. Is allowing a slow shift to the development of a middle class (that we hope rejects repressive ideas over time on their own) good enough? Surely any ham fisted attempts by Team America to affect the situation only cause the digging in of positions (even to the detriment of home grown similar feelings!), and grass roots only grow from within.
I have no idea what the "correct" position is geopolitically, but my gut tells me that any change has to happen from within and external trade is probably more of a benefit over time than isolationism (governmental OR corporate).
Posted by: John Lopez | March 10, 2008 at 12:51 PM
As someone who has done business with tech industries in China since the mid 90's, and for seven straight years with my RL business up to the present, I kind of smile when I hear of anyone trying to take on China seriously as a market to make money.
First rule of business is essentially this: you can contract goods and services okay, and even make money doing it. In fact, for many modern industries, if you *don't* outsource from China, India or various other countries like that - you won't survive. Period. I've seen many a limousine liberal talk a good game, then let their wallet do the real talking - just look in their shopping carts. For those thinking they can use China as a market to sell into, with the idea of bringing cash money out... carefully think again.
Sure, they do consume foreign goods and services. But if there is *any* chance you'll be in competition with a domestic supplier, well, you are gonna be in trouble quick.
The competition is insanely fierce. I remember when pay scales went from 28 cents an hour to 40 cents in southern China a number of years back - this incredible upheaval drove a lot of their production deeply inland... why? Because 40 cents an hour was just too expensive.
No western digital service provider is ever going to make it big over there. Because the Chinese government isn't stupid - it's just too easy to bide time, watch and learn, and then provide to the market domestically. Thus keeping the entire thing. You can't compete when a foreign government simply decides to subsidise its businesses with an essentially open bank account: http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=14694
* * * * *
So there's no pot of gold waiting on the other side of that rainbow - it's so bad, that virtual currencies themselves are a huge concern to the government - they shortcut the protections placed on the yuan.
Citation (WSJ):
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117519670114653518-FR_svDHxRtxkvNmGwwpouq_hl2g_20080329.html?mod=rss_free
Think of it as a situation like Second Life's own "World Stock Exchange" value counters in reverse. But in this case, the iffy currency facing false valuation is the officially backed yuan, not the virtual QQ coin, which has no nationalist strategy built into it against the global economy.
And that is China's true dilemma - how to keep an incredibly complex, mind-bogglingly diverse billion-plus people from crisis and starvation. One key method is devaluation of labour. If the average annual per capita income hovers around 5000 USD, instead of five or ten times that, China can be assured of economic growth, employment and many other stabilising factors. Well, sort of. The problems they face in the old industrial north, and inland are incredibly thorny and intractable even with all the market controls. In this light, imagining their government to allow any sort of plan to allow net value to *leave* China... is just insanely unlikely.
So in this context, it's crazy to consider 'business concerns' with regard to dissidents, citizens, whatever. There are some wonderful companies and wonderful people in China - they are people too, just like us. But imagine how life would be if you made 3000-5000 USD annually and lived in a dorm at your place of employment - or if you were lucky, in a small apartment within bicycling distance. And that was your life, and was going to be your child's and your grandchild's life. Don't even get me started on rural mainland China - I've seen four-year-olds making metal springs in a makeshift 'factory' in a barn. Dearest reader, you probably own a ton of stuff with parts made by children - yes, you. The 'green' recycled material is some of the worst-offending, when you consider how it's recovered.
The modern world means having electricity, not internet, to these people - and bending principles in the name of imaginary business possibilities isn't just amoral - it's financially foolish and amoral.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | March 10, 2008 at 03:05 PM
*edit for clarity:
"The modern world means having electricity, not internet, to these people *in rural China*..."
Bad paragraph break there on my part. As of course Shanghai and Hong Kong are better-connected than many places.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | March 10, 2008 at 03:11 PM
Thanks for that very important report and reality check. I'll bet 95 percent of the people gassing on about how they have to expand VWs and social media into China and therefore play by the Chinese human rights rules have NO CLUE about what they are really facing, which, frankly, ensues from...the Chinese rules for human rights which hamper the free economy and free trade, too, obviously. They all go together.
>how to keep an incredibly complex, mind-bogglingly diverse billion-plus people from crisis and starvation.
Well, one idea would be to stop perceiving them as a mind-boggling diverse billion-plus set of people that *you* have to feed, or that some centralized entity has to feed *all of* and realize that they can be freed at least in part to feed themselves.
I can remember the Soviets always talking about how they had to "keep 250 million people in shoes* or whatever their population was. But...nobody is asking them to do that. Let people make and wear and buy and sell...their own shoes. Etc.
I'm not suggesting that you try to turn an entire peasant nation of people used to being fed into Shanghai or Hong Kong, because you don't, without indeed riots or starvation. But you can get started on making more Hong Kongs and Shanghais by letting those units that can break off and wish to break off and be self-sufficient to do so.
I do hope your conclusion, given the rant about the kid making the box springs, is that morality is good business. Human rights are good business. Educating children and women usually means in a country that immediately, the society values them more and stops producing so many of them to be able to feed to death, illness, factory work, and farm labour. And so on. These policies aren't something new to be discovered, they are in effect in many developing countries already.
China's solution so far to its development problem has been to go abroad and give cheap loans to other developing countries in order to build them infrastructure like gas pipelines, so that everybody gets paid, and the Chinese usually wind up shoring up other oppressive regimes like the Sudanese. In this sense, it's just a kind of more malignant variant of Western imperialism that everybody bashes.
Let's see after 50 years or 100 years of not-the-East-India-Compan-but-worse whether we have educated women and call centers and outsourcing in Sudan or more killing and rioting.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 10, 2008 at 04:00 PM
You guys still don't get it and probably some haven't even been to China. You are judging the Chinese nation by your own standards. A basic premise is to first understand that the West has one standard it adheres to, and China has another. To impose Western standards onto China is a very colonial attitude that has already devastated Africa, Asia etc etc.
Freedom of Speech: Just because you think it is a god-given right in the West doesn't mean that the powers-that-be in China or other nations have to follow. The Chinese government is put in place (yes, firmly put in place, and if u can't accept that, find your own country, destroy their existing systems and install your choice of "democracy" or despot there instead- the US has a good track record at that) to govern 1.3 billion people, and its decree is that freedom of speech is not a right, so live with it. And for all foreigners and foreign corporations who can't accept that, get out of the country.
And for the naive, note that that bastion of freedom of speech, the US summarily throws people into Guantanamo Bay if they say the wrong things.
So you see, freedom of speech in irresponsible hands is a murderous weapon that can incite hatred, disturbance of peace and other acts that make governance an impossibility.
So who decides that when the wrong things are said an appropriate punishment should be meted out? It's the government, not observers from ANOTHER nation!
I am constantly amazed at the colonialist comments that are hurled at China.
"we are a DEMOCRACY, how dare the Chinese be Communists/we have freedom of speech, how dare the Chinese curtail freedom of speech/ we eat pancakes but silly Chinese eat rice......"...yes, it descends into farce - you're not like us, so you're wrong.
You have to realize that there are 2 systems at work here, if you judge the other based on your set of values, of course the other looks bad. I'm not here to simply blindly defend all of China's actions...it is a country, culture and system in evolution and that takes time - and different civilizations and countries evolve at different paces. Look back at your own country's heathen past and sins first and how much time it took to evolve.
It's all too easy to throw the Sudan curved ball into China's court, but you don't have to wait 50-100 years to realize the killing and rioting in Africa, it's been going strong for a long time already, pre-Chinese - and we have to thank the Europeans for that.
Posted by: aletheia | March 17, 2008 at 11:48 PM
You don't get it, either. There are millions of Chinese who emigrate to the West, and have done so for centuries. I guess that puts paid to the idea of their "different" values that have nothing in common with the rest of the worlds. This is merely the tired old "Asian Values" argument.
Oh, are they renegades and running dogs? Well, then how about the millions of other Chinese who come to study, teach, work, visit -- and go home? Guess they found something...of value?
The idea that the West is colonial belongs to the old world of the last century defined by communist belief systems. There are universal human rights, treaties by which China has bound itself as much as England or Burkina Faso. China doesn't discount this concept of universality anymore, even if you do.
The idea that the US "summarily throws people into Guantanamo Bay if they say the wrong things" is ignorant and stupid, some sort of exaggerated meme picked up from some poisoned news source. No such thing happens.
To be sure, there are grave concerns about mistreatment and even torture in Guantanamo, and human rights groups and lawyers rightly call to close it, and to bring those jailed to fair trial or release them if no evidence of a crime is found. There are many people who work on this effort within the United States, and that fact alone lets you know that the US is a very, very different place than Tibet, where people get mowed down by government troops and shot dead for demonstrating. Sorry, but there is no moral equivalance here, not even close.
You don't speak for the Chinese people, even if you are Chinese, and there are many Chinese who simply don't believe as you do. Your era in history is drawing to a close.
We don't have to thank any Europeans for any killing in Africa -- whatever sins of colonialism one can lay at the door of Europe (King Leopold), that's hardly an excuse for the genocidal campaigns of perfectly African Africans and not Europeans today. Excuse me, Khartoum has to send out genocidaire militias because...long ago Africans were colonialized? How does that work? What is the logic there?
There are 2 million people who have been killed in Sudan alone, and the number in the DRC is many millions more. Are you seriously prepared to claim this is due to "colonialism"? The Chinese government doesn't say that -- why would you?
You also seem to have more than a little racism in your invective here suggesting that Africans can't seem to be break out of 50-100 years of fighting.
I think you're not educated, except badly, on the internet. Perhaps a year abroad is in order : )
Meanwhile, you cannot post here without a real-life name, or Second Life avatar name, or blog name. Those are the rules. Otherwise we'd endlessly debate uneducated people like you forever, and that would be a waste of time : )
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 18, 2008 at 12:08 AM
@Prokofy
So it's obvious you don't like the alternative comments I've posted in the name of debate and you've suddenly imposed naming requirement rules in order to post. But at least let me have the right of final reply to the unwarranted personal attacks first.
Africa: it was not a racist comment. History will record the many wars in Africa over the years and even now, there are 15 wars going on there now! Geography will note that the unnatural partitions of territories by the Europeans wreaked havoc and the sad legacy is that yes, African Africans end up in war with each other.
Freedom of Speech: I mentioned that it is a recognized fact that there is no freedom of speech in China, and even in the US, Guantanamo Bay curtails some of the US citizens so-called rights to freedom of speech. I DID NOT equate the US to Tibet, and that was an unnecessary twisting of facts by you
Uneducated:The "uneducated" name-calling was a cheap shot to belittle me personally instead of just addressing the points I brought up. Fyi, I've spent a large portion of my life in different countries.
John Lopez in the first comment got it right when he said that "People waffle on this issue because it is a tough question without an apparent easy answer."
Over and out!
Posted by: aletheia | March 18, 2008 at 07:33 AM