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China: Revenue opportunities and the Internet death penalty

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China

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 27 Nov 2003 15:10 GMT

McNealy is happy to sell into a country that suppresses human rights and access to the Internet while touting the benefits of a free and open technology standards. "I have always maintained that separating the good guys from the bad guys is as easy now as it was in old Hollywood Westerns. The good guys are the ones who openly publish their programming interfaces -- the modern-day equivalent of wearing a white hat -- so that anyone can make a compatible product. The bad guys are the ones who don't. The black hats don't want you to have any choice." It's unclear where countries that put you in prison for publishing information they don't like fall in McNealy's classification system.

Some businesspeople may see human rights issues as needlessly emotive and irrelevant to the world of technology. But even from a purely technical standpoint it seems incongruous that tech companies which shout about the power of the Web to transform business and society would be happy to proudly publicise deals with a regime that actively suppresses access to the Internet. In one US study, China was found to be blocking 19,000 Web sites, including those providing news, health information, political coverage and entertainment. In November last year, Amnesty named 33 companies including Microsoft, Sun and Cisco that it said were providing China with technology to achieve its Internet censorship aims.

More worryingly, according to Amnesty some 40 people are currently imprisoned or detained in China for terms of between two and 11 years in connection with the use of the Internet. Huang Qi, a computer engineer from Sichuan, has been imprisoned since June 2000 for publishing various articles on his Web site relating to human rights and political issues including the Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to Amnesty. At his trial, lawyers raised the issue of freedom of speech but the court rejected the claims, stating that "while freedom of speech is the political right of the citizens of this country, citizens must not harm the interests of the nation in exercising that right and should not use rumour or slander to incite the subversion of the state." On 21 January 2001, the Supreme People's Court ruled that those who cause "especially serious harm" by providing "state secrets" to overseas organisations and individuals over the Internet may be sentenced to death.

At the very least Gates, Dell and McNealy are guilty of serious double-talk from a technical standpoint -- by talking up the power of the Internet to change society and then selling their technology to a government intent on keeping society locked down. But more serious are the moral questions raised by being happy to bask in the glow of good deeds while turning a blind eye to humanitarian abuses in the pursuit of new markets.