Over the past couple of years, a succession of American tech executives have decamped to Beijing to pander to the dictatorial leadership there. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, has shown a penchant for flattering the ruling caste in China; he has repeatedly visited the country that his company, Facebook, remains banned in. The motives of these executives is plain: China has the world’s largest Internet user base, yet many major American websites—YouTube, Twitter, Facebook—are blocked by its so-called Great Firewall. Which means that China represents a huge untapped market.
The rub is that, many tech companies don’t admit the plain fact that they’re out to make a profit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Instead, they cast their businesses in strictly moral terms. Facebook’s goal is to “bring the world closer together,” you see. The benevolent overlords are Google, meanwhile, are guided by their mission to not “be evil.” (Which, come to think of it, should be a pretty low barrier to clear.) But that leads to serious moral myopia: Zuckerberg sings the praises of a repressive Chinese regime, for example. And Eric Schmidt, of the supposedly non-evil Google, travels to North Korea against the State Department’s wishes. His company also readily censors search engine results in repressive countries.
This week it was Tim Cook’s turn to kowtow. The Apple honcho was in China at a conference, that, in the words of Bloomberg, was “designed to globally promote the country’s vision of a more censored and controlled internet.” Cook’s appearance at this confab was a symbolic victory for Chinese repression. It also came on the heels of Apple’s decision last month to remove apps that provide for uncensored communications from its Chinese store. Basically, what happened was that Beijing told Cook to remove Skype—and he quickly complied.
The Great Firewall, in other words, is working. The firewall is often thought of as a purely political tool: It was first deployed as a way to censor information (searches pertaining to the Tiananmen Square massacre are blocked in China, for example) and prevent unfettered communication. The logic being that it’s harder to organize a rebellion if people can’t communicate with one another easily.
But was began as a tool of political repression has become an economic weapon. The Great Firewall now also functions as a subsidy for Chinese tech companies.
Take Weibo and Renren, two of China’s most popular social networks. Weibo is a direct rip-off of Twitter; Renren is a clone of Facebook. It’s pretty obvious that the only reason these sites even exist is that the real ones are blocked in China. They would have no raison d’etre otherwise. The proof of this is that Twitter and Facebook have conquered pretty much everywhere they aren’t blocked. Even Japan, famous for its hostility to foreign things, has embraced the sites. (Quaintly, Japan also loves Yahoo.) So, by blocking Facebook and Twitter, China has not only cut down on chances of dissent, it also gave a fillip to Chinese businesses over foreign competition.
The United States formally objected to the WTO labelling China a market economy this week. The Great Firewall is a good illustration of why this objection was perfectly legitimate.
