The Chinese Communist Party and Google

Edward Friedman: The CCP and Google

THE CCP regime has brushed off Google’s complaints about hacking into the Google email accounts of Chinese human rights activists, imposing political censorship on Google’s search engine, and seeking to steal invaluable Google codes. The Beijing government responded that it did not hack into Google and that Google should respect Chinese law—that is, the commands of an authoritarian regime that are intended to preserve its monopoly of arbitrary power.

Ever since Hu Jintao became the paramount leader in 2002, he has intensified repression and behaved with more hostility toward the United States. Google has long been a thorn in the side of the Hu regime, because it tries to help Chinese netizens get around CCP regime’s internet censorship. For Beijing, the United States backs what Google is doing because it seeks to launch a democracy movement in China that is similar to the one that broke out in Iran.

Few commentators in the world’s democracies would join Google in taking on the powerful regime in Beijing. Bill Gates declared that IT firms should obey Chinese law. Columnists opined that Google was just covering up a supposed business failure, only winning 32 percent of China’s rich and growing search engine market. No IT firm backed Google. Some pundits called Google naive for not “understanding” that Chinese culture was authoritarian and that the Chinese people welcome a strong hand to guide them through the vicissitudes of modernization.

There is scant evidence for a conclusion that Google’s stand for freedom against the CCP regime’s ever stronger push to roll back human rights around the world is enhancing the forces of freedom. Authoritarian China seems in the driver’s seat.

The economy is decisive. China has accumulated US$2.4 trillion. It spends this all over the world and buys influence in Latin America, Africa, Central Asia, and elsewhere.

What is changing is the attitude of the governments of the industrialized democracies toward the CCP policies which facilitate China running trade surpluses with all the diverse regions of the world. Beijing’s practices increasingly seem unfair, illegal and a huge obstacle to rapid global recovery from the 2008 crash. But the likelihood is that if the industrialized democracies act to counter unfair and illegal Chinese policies, the newly self-confident and assertive CCP regime will push back. A game of economic chicken could produce beggar-thy-neighbor results with a potential to unleash a depression worse than the one in 1929.

With so much at stake—both the fate of universal human rights and global prosperity—it is sad to find so many people dismissing Google’s concerns as if the CCP regime were not doing something peculiarly dangerous but instead were engaged in business as usual. In that view, all governments do what China is doing.

But Google is not a government. And Google was not hacking secret Chinese government sites. And surely there is a huge difference between court-monitored hacking in search of would-be murderers plotting to blow up innocent people and Chinese hacking to stop courageous Chinese from protecting innocent people in China who are being victimized by their government.

But what is decisive for ruling groups in China is a conviction that since the 2008 financial crash wounded the industrial democracies, now is the time for a rising China to establish itself as a global pole at least the equal of the United States. The CCP regime has good conscience in what it does to Google and other victims because it sees China as on the side of a better world in contrast to an America that has invaded Iraq, created torture prisons, and was so in the thrall of an economic ideology that it caused a financial crash that has spread pain all around the world. In contrast, China is helping the wretched of the earth rise. For China, the Google issue is but a smokescreen to undermine China and its good work around the world.

Given these attitudes, it is more than likely that Beijing will continue to manipulate its currency, thereby forcing the industrialized democracies to respond in ways which virtually guarantee dangerous international clashes.

Edward Friedman is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he specializes in Chinese politics. He recently wrote Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (Yale University Press, 2005).