As CPJ marks its 25th anniversary, our early board members and former directors look ahead to the emerging challenges facing the international press. Moderator John Carroll, Knight visiting lecturer at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, leads the panel in a two-week discussion about Iraq, national security, Internet censorship, and the new threats to press freedom.
| Other Topics Iraq Stringers and Fixers Israel-Lebanon Conflict United States Standards Reporting in Censored Countries Emerging Threats |
The Panel  |
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Your comments and reactions are welcome. Write to cpj@cpj.org |
Posted July 26, 2006
From John Carroll: More than half of the 32 journalists jailed in China in 2006 were Internet-based, and at least two were arrested with the cooperation of U.S. Internet companies. Do U.S. Internet companies have a moral obligation to resist Chinese government censorship? Should our government forbid U.S. corporations from enabling press repression abroad?
From Peter Arnett: I notice that the Google search engine has as of today 9,390,000 entries on “Chinese Internet censorship,” and those I scrolled through were all critical. So unlike most of the issues we have been discussing these past several days, this subject is front and center across the world and goes far beyond the aspect that most interests us: the victimization of Internet journalists. CPJ has the special skills to handle repression in the traditional international media and continues to use them effectively. Maybe in grappling with the predicaments of our “new media” colleagues CPJ needs to reach out more than in the past to human rights organizations and political groups that seek freedoms not only of speech but of assembly and religion.
To some degree, the question raised about the moral obligations of U.S. technology companies in China echoes those concerning American business relations with South Africa in the early days of the apartheid regime. The response then was for our government to impose strict sanctions on business activities, leading, many observers believe, to the hastening of the end of apartheid. Regime change is not the issue this time around and sanctions are unfeasible. But one would hope that the volume of outrage expressed in the very vehicles in which they do business will encourage major Internet companies to be more responsive, and more active in resisting Chinese government censorship. Declaring, as Google has, that it “respects the fact that people and organizations, including Amnesty International, oppose our decision to launch a search service in China,” is not enough. Google said it believes its services “will provide significant benefits to Chinese Internet users and that our engagement in China meaningfully expands access to information there.” But the Internet with its inherent freedoms is potentially a loaded gun in repressive societies. The American companies that provide these services in China surely should do more to protect local users who are encouraged to blog and banter online as do their brothers and sisters around the world. That half of all journalists arrested in China this year were Internet-based surely shows that the Internet companies are not doing enough.
Should our government forbid corporations from enabling press repression abroad? Our government should do more, but I would substitute the word “pressure” for forbid at least until the issue clarifies. The European Parliament has recently called for a code of conduct governing the online censorship of dissidents that seems to be a workable model adequate for the time being. It wants the biggest communication companies to pledge not to help governments censor their citizens, asserting that “the Chinese government has successfully persuaded companies such as Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft to facilitate the censorship of their services in the Chinese internet market.” The European Parliament document, while not legally enforceable, does draw attention to the most blatant violations, strongly condemning restrictions on Internet content and the harassment and imprisonment of journalists on the Web, and demanding unrestricted Internet access by all peoples. There also seems an emerging opportunity for a United Nations role in this issue. And clearly, an important role for CPJ.
From Anthony Lewis: The question of how U.S.Internet companies should deal with Chinese censorship is a hard one for me. On the one hand, my stomach turned when one of the companies cooperated in the arrest of a critic. On the other, I think even a censored version of Google and other U.S. material does expand Chinese awareness of the outside world and its values.
I supported sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa: the withdrawal of financial facilities and the sports boycott. But China seems to me very different. Pretoria was acutely sensitive to those pressures. Keeping cricket teams out focused South African minds on what the world thought of their racism. Citibank’s refusal to roll over loans pinched badly. De Klerk gave up and freed Mandela because he saw that the country was at the end of the financial road.
Those conditions do not apply in China. No one can believe that China is vulnerable to financial sanctions or that the United States or any other country would seriously undertake them. So it is in good part a matter of self-respect for us. No self-respecting Internet company should help Beijing jail a dissenter. But agree to use a somewhat edited Chinese version of Google? I think that’s sad but OK.
As for the idea of an American law forbidding cooperation with press repression abroad, that’s dreaming. Members of Congress these days seem delighted at the idea of repressing press "traitors."
Which leads to a final point. We have enough motes in our eye these days to worry about before we try to apply the First Amendment in other countries.
FOLLOW UP
From Jane Kramer: I think we’re talking about two different problems. The first involves corporate policy: Do internet companies have an obligation not to develop markets, access, and services in countries like China, where dissident internet journalists are censored and, increasingly, imprisoned? And the second involves a provider’s obligation not to cooperate in the repression—thus making those journalists at least marginally less vulnerable than they are now. Accountability would be lovely, but realistically, it’s not going to happen—if for no reason than that the present American government has no interest in attaching human-rights provisos to American activity in the global market. (That would pretty much mean an end not just to Internet business but to most of the business we conduct with —this has to be my favorite euphemism—"favored nations.")
The second problem is different, perhaps because the government has already sliced that pie to its own interests. We’ve seen huge invasions of electronic privacy and freedom of information at home since 9/11, and not just involving colleagues; think of the SWIFT banking scandal. This kind of surveillance has become equated in the public mind with the war on terror. I doubt if anyone in this discussion group is free from some sort of Internet intercept. And what’s worse, the public (read voters) accepts it. The argument that everybody loses when the First Amendment loses has so far been notably absent from this year’s congressional campaigns. And I think that as long as our own government can get away with claiming national interest, national security—and expecting (and occasionally getting) blanket cooperation from providers at home—it’s naive to expect that those same providers will (or can) be asked to stop the kind of cooperation they’re giving to governments abroad as the price of doing business.
Especially when it comes to China. Too much money is involved. Too much investment, too much debt. Of course, U.S. Internet companies have a moral obligation to resist censorship. Of course, our government should take a stand. But China is simply too lucrative for its investors for us to expect much of them in the way of noble stands. Google in China is not the Body Shop. (Plus, financial blackmail involving civil rights issues is no surprise in the business world. Remember what happened to Warren Buffet’s matching-donations-to-charities program for BH investors when a couple of big right-wing shareholders complained about those charities dispensing family-planning information? The program disappeared. )
So what can be done (as opposed to what should be done)? Whatever happens in November, we have two and a half years left of a presidency demonstrably unconcerned with, if not hostile to, press-freedom issues. We have governments in most of the industrialized world that, whatever their rhetoric about censorship, are desperate to be competitive in world markets. And we have Internet giants whose "moral obligations" go by the board in the kind of market China represents. I have a family friend in prison in China now (though he wasn’t put there with the collusion of an American company), so the question of how and what any of us can do for our Chinese colleagues is of real personal concern. We have tended to assume that whatever we mean by "globalism" was going to spread respect for a public sphere—or at least an acknowledgment that free speech and the market have some connection—but it seems to have spread mainly the protection of financial and political interests, at least as they are perceived.
Thinking back on the topics raised in the past week, I have to say that this one, which seemed at first like the simplest, and certainly the mildest, is the most elusive. We can figure out ways to help protect the stringers and field assistants and translators and fixers we use, or at least to pressure the people we work for to assume more responsibility than they like to take on now. We can figure out how to cover North Korea. But I honestly don’t know what we can even begin to do about this one—beyond writing about it, broadcasting about it as much as possible. If it’s hard to shame the Chinese government, it may be equally hard to shame the Internet providers we have come to depend on—and are not likely to abandon. But we should give it a shot. This should be ongoing news. That’s our responsibility—to keep up the pressure against this sort of collusion. But the reality may be that the majority of China’s Internet journalists would rather risk trouble with their government than lose the access that foreign providers give them to news, to their colleagues, to the rest of the world—including the world of some moral support.