Transnationals swap ethics for profit in China

OneWorld UK

By Nury Vittachi, a journalist and author based in China

ETHICS FOR SALE: going cheap. Multinationals are racing to put their principles up for sale in exchange for a share of the China market.
In the latest case, Internet firm Yahoo handed to Chinese authorities details of a journalist who was arrested for leaking information.
It follows hard on the heels of cases in which Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. collaborated with the Chinese government to block attempts to mention democracy on the Internet.
The Yahoo case has created a firestorm of anger and boycott threats in Internet forums worldwide.
It involved an alleged leak of information to a hostile overseas element in an email bearing the address huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn. The email contained personal notes mentioning the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The authorities turned up at the trial with precise details of which computer it was sent from, and at what time and date. The documents said: Account holder information furnished by Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd.
The writer of the email, a reporter named Shi Tao, was found guilty of leaking information and sentenced to 10 years in jail in a case that has shocked Internet users around the world.
Speaking in China recently, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang indicated that if they had not provided the information the Chinese authorities demanded, his own staff would have faced arrest. I will not put our employees at risk, he said.
Further, he argued that when they get official demands for information, they have no way of telling what the case is about: We do not know what they want that information for.
A third line of defence said that the firm had to follow local laws, regulations and customs.
Critics dismiss these arguments, pointing out that Yahoo and other Internet firms guard their customer data strenuously in other countries. The offer to follow Chinese customs caused ire, too. Anything can be called a custom, Nocolas Becquelin of Human Rights in China told The Christian Science Monitor.
Even more tellingly, the Yahoo office that revealed the information was the Hong Kong operation which is not obliged to follow mainland Chinese laws, but is instead fully protected by a long-established Western-style legal system.
If anything, the Microsoft Corp. case is even more indefensible. In its China blogging service, MSN Spaces, Microsoft is automatically censoring words such as human rights and democracy. Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn admitted that they had filters preventing the use of such words. Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here, he told the press.
Similarly, users of Google and Yahoo search services in China have found that websites dealing with democracy have been removed from the search indexes.
Other transnationals have also been accused of supporting oppression. The authorities in China do much of their censorship work using a digital Internet surveillance system called Policenet developed and installed by Cisco Systems, a United States firm.
Although the latest batch of cases involves Internet firms, other branches of the multinational media have been sidelining their own ethical standards in return for a piece of the China market. In the late 1990s, a publishing house ultimately controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch paid former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten in advance for a book he was writing on China but then declined to publish it.
Perhaps most chillingly, a television channel set up in China by a Singaporean businessman, Robert Chua, in the 1990s carried the slogan No sex, no violence, no news. It was deliberately designed to keep out permissive attitudes and keep the public in the dark about what was happening. Chua said at the time that he believed the slogan would make the operation attractive to investors wanting a share of the China market, and he later sold it to Western business people.
If the biblical saying that the truth shall set you free is anything to go by, transnationals are working hard to make sure that the people of China are prevented from receiving it. They have their eye on a reward: a slice of the estimated 95 million Internet users in China (the second largest group of surfers after the US).
But the Yahoo case, perhaps because it involves an individual sent to prison, has created the biggest furore. Stephen Frost, a commentator at City University of Hong Kong, told the South China Morning Post that Yahoo had caused enormous damage in a few days to a reputation that had taken years to build. This is the kind of thing that people dont forget, he said. People will always sort of refer back to them: You know Yahoo was the informant for the mainland police.