The possibility that Google employees were involved in facilitating the cyber-attack on their own company brings up serious questions about the security of companies overall that operate in China. Is your company safe from your own employees?

With the dissolution of Communist ideology in a profane society, most Chinese have taken on the mantle of nationalism to fill a collective existential void. The basis of this form of nationalism is the wrong that other countries have done China in the past. That includes the Opium Wars;the 21 powers that entered Beijing’s gates after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900;  plus Japan, with the  the atrocities its soldiers committed during its War of Aggression. Daily and nightly television programming and state-run papers in China rabbit on about the incursions as though they had happened just yesterday; meanwhile, most of the rest of the world has moved on to other challenges and to creating new chapters of history. Still, the leadership drones on in Cultural-Revolution fashion about building a strong, self-sufficient nation – even if it is at the expense of the trust other countries place in the Chinese experiment.

Companies in highly sensitive industries – especially those in which technology development has an abiding relationship with their home-country’s national interests – perhaps should be concerned with vetting employees a little more closely than in the past, and with creating monitoring systems and internal controls that act as firewalls against complete enterprise compromise.

It seems Western brands of open-ness and sense of “fair play” may not fit snugly in China’s chip on its shoulder.

Further reading: Reuters, CNET