This New Year, plenty of eulogies have been written of the so-called Chinese decade. At its start, the US GDP was more than eight times that of China; it?s barely four times larger today. By some estimates, the share of China?s private consumption to GDP will overtake that of the US by 2020. An even broader historical sweep has many analysts reading the end of centuries of Western ascendancy into the new US-China relationship.
Beyond economic factors, new theses have emerged about the relevance of such sermons on democracy as America has preached through the previous century into the first. After all, the authoritarian Chinese state steered its people to great growth while the Great Recession decimated employment and markets in the US.
But there is a disturbing undertone to the China growth story that high-spirited eulogies cannot accommodate. There?s a fear that, as far as political freedom and human rights are concerned, the bloody Tiananmen Square suppression of 1989 can?t be buried as a footnote in history. Not yet. International businesses also sense this when they accept controls in China that they wouldn?t in their home countries. The size and significance of the Chinese market means they don?t want to get on the wrong side of its rulers or test their sensitivity. This explains why Google has hitherto kowtowed to Chinese censors. But, in a radical new development, the company seems ready to turn over a more aggressive leaf.
Actually, there has been speculation about Google reorienting itself in China since last September, when its country head Kai-Fu Lee resigned and set off an exodus of other local staff. There has always been a disconnect between the ?Don?t be evil? motto that Sergey Brin and Larry Page proffered in their 2004 IPO document and Google.cn that was launched in 2006. While their mission document read, ?We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served?as shareholders and in all other ways?by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains,? Brin and Page repeatedly caved in to demands for censoring search results in China. This was all about ?short-term gains? rather than doing ?good things for the world?. But industry watchers have been seeing this basic conflict coming to a head for some time now, and especially since September.
Two developments worth highlighting took place in the interim. First, Google weathered the Great Recession well. In the third quarter, its profits jumped 27% and topped Wall Street expectations. In China, however, while Lee led the company?s market share to grow from 21% in 2007 to 31% in 2009, the local contender, Baidu, remained entrenched in the first spot. Whether it was offering more Mandarin-friendly searches or bucking Google at being the first to provide social media for conducting searches, Baidu has remained ahead. After years of compromising with government authorities to grow in the local market, Google?s China returns remain an insignificant part of its global revenue. Conventional wisdom says the Chinese market is too big to walk away from, but Google has invested enough to really test this perception. It?s actually in a position to defy it.
Second, not only have democratic reforms stalled in China, it has in fact been cracking down on dissidence with increasing intensity. Democracy advocate Liu Xiabo was jailed on Christmas Day. One of his last blog posts, before the detention, took note of how much harder it was to mobilise activists in the pre-Web days: ?The Internet is God?s present to China.?
Google?s plaint this week, posted under the title, A new approach to China, refers to highly sophisticated and targeted attacks on its corporate infrastructure whose primary goal was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. It reads: ?We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.? And goes on to say that Google is no longer willing to continue censoring results on Google.cn, even if this means having to shut down the portal and the company?s offices in China.
Not all companies have the luxury of sidelining the Chinese market and still continuing to grow. But we should not under-estimate the resolve Brin and Page are showing here. There are plenty of bigger and more insulated fish in the global pond, and none of them has staged as bold a confrontation with the Chinese authorities.
One must also underline that China has the largest number of Internet users in the world today. If Baidu alone rules, some fear that the Internet will deteriorate into an intranet. But in the face of the political storm gathering over China, it?s more likely that consumers will drive it to a more democratic form. Just as, let?s face it, they have driven Google back to its ?Don?t be evil? origins.
renuka.bisht@expressindia.com
