China vs. U.S. on Censorship

...“The U.S. has criticized China’s policies to administer the Internet and insinuated that China restricts Internet freedom. We urge the United States to respect the facts and cease using so-called Internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China,” said Ma Zhaoxu, Chinese spokesperson.

Well, you do restrict the Internet, China- the question is not really whether you decide what people can access or not- you do. The question is truly what is the line in the Internet? Is it really the kind of place where anything and everything should go? Should there be some restriction or shouldn’t there be? That is the real question. And as it stands now, the U.S. is in no position to tell China what it can and cannot do in its country. If I were the Chinese government I would be ravenously upset.

Two issues: The U.S. has no control over how China controls its media. If they want to burn books and turn the Internet off, we can’t really do anything about it. Also, that’s not really what is going on that has caused the problem- the accusation is that people hacked into Google and did some damage, maybe stole information. Fine- that seems like a crime. Google deals in information, but they don’t even own it. So if somebody came in and broke into Google and broke their tools that they built and own, well, ok then. That would be akin to people coming into a store and breaking a bunch of hangers, or going into a restaurant and stealing all the forks.

But it’s not the kind of thing that is easy to figure out. The U.S. is walking a thin line hassling China about this stuff- if we start getting involved in international business disputes with foreign governments it is going to get ugly fast for us. If we start making freedom of speech an issue all over the world- oh, wait. We already do. The problem this time is that China is big and powerful enough to not listen to us. If they don’t want to change their policies, then they don’t have to and there’s nothing we can do about it. We are buying their goods and they are buying our debt. They have way more people than us. They are greener than us. They have the hookups for raw materials in Africa that we don’t have. We are waiting to see if our stock market and businesses will survive the economic downturn. We have soaring unemployment. We have a housing crisis that will get worse in coming years- we are about to see our middle class collapse on itself as loans turn home values upside down. And we are hassling China about not letting people read liberal news on the Internet? As if there are no liberal thinkers there without Google showing the Huffington Post? Come on, U.S. government. Stop avoiding the issues, here.

We are falling apart. China is coming back. This is the wrong fight to pick- and it’s not even the real issue. Hopefully the U.S. will let it be a company dealing with a law in another country that we have no control over and leave it at that. Log the fact that you’re upset and leave it at that. Get on to important stuff.

 Photo Credit: thelampnyc (via Flickr under CCL)