How can it be possible for China to build an Innovation Nation when it’s internet – the backbone of so much of 21st-century innovation – is so tightly controlled and filtered?
Listen here to the latest Hotpot Podcast in which I hold forth on the nature of innovation in China and discuss the writing project I’m working on now. (Running time: 9 minutes, 26 seconds.)
The Diplomat has posted an exclusive excerpt from my upcoming book China Inside Out: 10 Irreversible Trends Re-shaping China and Its Relationship with the World, in which I discuss my meeting with Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the implications of Charter 08 for Chinese access to the internet.
Though I am bald 
I know what a bad hair day is like (I used to have hair, you know): it’s when you just can’t get that cow lick down or that set of bangs straight or that afro even. It’s also a feeling. The day has started out poorly and you know it’s going to not go as smoothly as you like and you know it’s going to end in tears (yours or “theirs”).
Well, today I had a “bad google” day here in China. I am up to my armpits in copy edit – alligators for my new book (China Inside Out) and the editor expects me to actually be accurate with my footnotes (the sheer nerve!). In some instances that requires my digging up the original article, re-reading it and making sure I said what I meant and meant what I said and annotated it all. I use google to do that. Or, at least, that was my plan today.
But the GFW foiled my plans, with constant “Resets” to my web page searches via google. It wasn’t as though I was googling porn or historical faux pas the powers that be would rather forget (as well as have the rest of the world follow). The GFW also thwarted the vpn I use to get at the North American version of google; access to the search engine was patchy at best. I was so frustrated and irritated I actually started using alternative search engines like Bing (good for article searches) and dogpile (good for images). As a matter of principal I refuse to use Baidu, as they are in bed with the nefarious technochiks who are getting up my nose while I try to do my work.
The more censors interfere with ubiquitous technologies in the name of leveling a domestic playing field by cheating, the more I root for the other guy. Bending the rules (even if they’re the WTO’s), will only hurt the spectators.
NOTE: The photo above was taken this past summer at a tour of a solar cell factory in China. Thanks to the wise guys I work with for the make-over. -bd
Related posts:
Why Google will Remain Number 1 in the World
Foreign IT companies are feeling less welcome than ever in China as the national government feels the country’s own sector is muscular enough to go it alone. On May 1, 2010 foreign companies that want to tender for government contracts will have to release their source code and security keys to government agencies for scrutiny. Central government wants to make its own information infrastructure secure against foreign intrusion, possibly pilfer leading-edge technology, and lock up its own domestic market to the exclusion of foreign players.
John Neuffer, vice-president for global policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, a lobby group, said: “The looming choice for many of our companies is to create costly bifurcated product lines, one for China and one for the rest of the world, or to ponder less ambitious trade and investment choices in that market.”
As China continues its turn inward, it endangers its ability to share in the information exchanges that flow through countries boosting Innovation. Ming Dynasty emperors did very much the same thing in breaking up the great commercial fleet of Zheng He, the shipyards in which the ships were built, and restricting the flow of activity across the Silk Road. Six hundred years later we may be hearing history’s echo.
Further reading: FT
Previous posts:
The Clever, the Genius and the Just Plain Dumb
I have this dark vision that one day in China I will attempt to log onto the web in China and it simply won’t be there. Only the People’s Daily appears, and perhaps handful of official mouthpieces as well. Every other website is down – foreign and domestic – and email no longer sends or receives messages.
I have an uncomfortable feeling that someone somewhere in Beijing has his finger on an “internet button” that will simply shut the entire super-network down here in China, just as they were able to in Xinjiang. Of course, you may be thinking, that would be madness. And it would be. But seldom have I ever seen or experienced a situation in which common sense trumped control – it’s usually the other way around, with Power self-destructing in a final, incindiary show of narcissim.
Xinjiang’s economy grew nearly a percentage point less than the country’s as whole, while its total trade volume was nearly twenty percent less than its provincial cousins. Still, central government keeps the electronic screws on the region, perhaps irreperably hurting the economy. It’s certainly affected Chinese investment in the region, as entrepreneurs throughout Xinjiang have been crippled as much as indigenous businesses.
Power disrupts; absolute power disrupts even itself.
Further reading: NYT
Previous posts:
When Big Brother Might Be Your Own Brother
How to be picked up by a Techno-chik in China
After witnessing the synergy between people power and media technologies in Iran, China’s leadership has been especially leary of the same sort of upset happening to their rule. The more militarily-minded are especially concerned about frontal assaults on their internet security. The Communist Party’s Global Times wrote in December last year that an unsuspecting government worker opened an email that let loose a worm that sucked away information specific to a submarine program.
The New York Times reports that for the last two years the Chinese national government has been investing more heavily in local hardware and software. The article notes that the effort is somewhat contradictory (this is China, after all), in that the state-of-the art equipment and programs come from the West, while China’s are very much still a work in promise (recall Green Dam blocking software, which was riddled by security holes).
In addition to wanting to control the content Chinese users receive, the leadership also wants to make sure that the next generation infrastructure and protocols allow them to keep their committee-finger on the button. In other words, if they feel they need to completely shut down China’s internet in, for instance, time of war or extreme social discontent, they will be able to as effectively as they had Xinjiang last summer.
Western businesses invested in China should be sure they have frequent back-ups of their financial and operational data to their home countries, lest the PRC decide international business be damned, political survival takes precedence. The economic testosterone coursing through arthritic arteries in Beijing believing it can go it alone, if it must.
But then again, just because they’re paranoid, doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get them.
Past posts:
The Internet Opens Up to the World
When Big Brother Might Be Your Own Brother
How to be picked up by a Techno-chik in China
My access to google (.cn and .com) are still intact, so the Chinese government has yet to retaliate against Google’s face-losing (for the government) accusation that the government sponsored a Spectre-like attack (for you Bond fans) on Google customer accounts (including, most recently revealed, several foreign journalists in Beijing). The Google gauntlet the multinational has thrown at the feet of China’s leadership has highlighted the concerns other multinationals have about their cyber-security. If Google’s email accounts can be hacked by a shadow organization in China, then certainly theirs can be, as well. At least, I hope that’s how their thinking goes. A recent poll showed that members of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (Beijing) stated, “we are concerned about the security of commercial correspondence, data and networks.” The cyber-kerfuffle has also exacerbated a blow-back State-side, in which Chinese companies are increasingly under suspicion of being launch pads for cyber-attacks on American companies. Whether the Chinese government actually directed the attacks on Google accounts (as well as a score other American companies), the government must be increasingly cognizant of Newton’s Theory of Globalization: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (well, maybe it’s a corollary).
Though I do expect a rapprochement between Google and the Chinese government, I don’t expect the powers that be to end its cyber-intrusions into personal and commercial spaces. Companies based in China, then, should work into their IT controls frequent all-data back-ups to headquarters in their home countries. One never knows now when China-based systems might be compromised, and a blanket blackout Xinjiang-style might be placed on commercial hubs in China.
There may come a point when control becomes mightier than the Yuan.
Read more: Cyber attacks aimed at defense groups; US to increase scrutiny of China companies
Also see:
Will China be In-grown or Grown-Up?
Are Your Employees Trustworthy?
A Chinese minister recently likened Google’s promise to stop self-censoring links the Chinese government considers illicit to Chinese companies polluting and exploiting their way through Africa without consideration for African mores and laws. It’s a comparison that badly misfires. The Minister chose to compare Google’s behavior in China with the clear and wanton exploitation of entire nations on the continent. Though at surface China’s investment in African infrastructure has benefited some communities, many African nations are beginning to put the breaks on Chinese laissez faire investment that sees a one-way extraction of natural resources with little else than roads to show for a debit that can never be repaid to the bit of Mother Nature for which they are charged as stewards. From accusations of Chinese companies bribing entire governments through shoddy workmanship, Chinese companies are not endearing themselves to African citizens to the same extent Google has opened up the world to Chinese internet users. Should one of China’s oil companies threaten to pull out of Nigeria, for instance, will African citizens lay flowers at thesteps of the oil company’s Africa office? I doubt it.
Read more: WSJ
See also:
Chinese Overseas Direct Investment Hits a Wall
New Prescription Needed: Blurring a Bi-polar World
Better information might have helped Marie
I’ve come to realize in recently having had my China visa renewed just how much more strict authorities have become in their dealings with foreign residents than in the past. Westerners that live here believe Chinese leniency for the sloppiness and/or laziness of Westerners ended as the 2008 Olympics approached. Now, with the leadership having steered the economy from the Scylla of global financial meltdown, it’s been bolder about the place of foreign investment in China. It sees no Charybdis.
Tom Friedman wrote recently in the New York Times that China’s government elite has a choice in whether it will permit its society to participate in the global Flow of information that will be the competitive fount for the 21-century’s innovative companies, or whether – by shutting Google down in the country – it will choose to close in on itself, so starving its home-grown companies from the vitality of ideas and perspectives circulating through the world wide web. Will the leadership be in-grown or grown-up?
I have very seldom seen leadership cliques surrender up power and wealth to forces they could not control, without first ensuring they would not lose the wealth they had accumulated and without making sure their power would dissipate into historic obsolescence. Usually, power-cliques that run companies and societies will sacrifice evolution of the organization in favor of maintaining and consolidating power, if evolution means the new condition dissolves some of their power. Of course, we all say from the outside, “that’s suicidal.” “No organization wants to suicide.” The management of American corporations is based on this precept; hence, we allow listed companies to choose and pay for their own auditors; we imagine that the masters of the universe on Wall Street would never do anything to endanger the markets; and we believe societies would never attack other countries.And yet we have Enrons, Arthur Andersons, Wall Street, a couple of world wars and regional conflagrations that seem unending. The dissolution of apartheid in South Africa is one of the rare instances in the world in which the elite chose to devolve its power.
Consistently, when events come down to the power-clique deciding whether it should survive or its ward should evolve beyond it, the clique has chosen self-preservation. So, though I do believe the CCP and Google will actually come to a rapprochement during this round, I expect the powers that be to continue on the path its set itself to accrete wealth and power, and to consolidate it for the forseeable future, albeit more softly-softly than before.
Though China is nowhere close to melting itself down, the leadership’s entrenchment and refusal to diffuse power – even to its technology vanguard – can only lead to a China increasingly detached from the world.
Previous post: The Enron Effect and China
It was Andrew Hupert, adjunct professor at New York University’s Shanghai campus and author of the China Solved blog, who first brought up to me China’s trend toward what he called the Fractured Web, at a cafe in Shanghai during the summer of 2009. He saw the powers that be as having no interest in lifting the blocks on such Western internet institutions as Facebook, Youtube, Blogger and others. Indeed, bending the internet inward with the Great Firewall of China would relieve its fledgling internet companies a leg up on international competition, and reinforce the level of self-censorship the Party desires in the burgeoning information age.
Google’s revolt against cyber-intrusions and censorship has brought a spotlight on the degree to which apparatchiks have been able to bend internet space and fold China’s engagement with the world in on itself. The Financial Times, in particular, has an extended article on the evolution of China’s internet self-involvement, which, though certainly has government impetus, is also driven by cultural preferences and linguistic shortcomings.
As the FT rightly points out, though, “In spite of heightened censorship in the past year – leading to Google’s complaints – the internet is still the freest space in Chinese society.”
Past blog post: One Country, Two Webs
Interesting article found by RT @BillDodson88: China's big bet on green industry – and how it might green the world http://t.co/rPJfPSJQ
China's big bet on green industry – and how it might green the world http://t.co/6TPl2sed
The china-business-tweeps Daily is out! http://t.co/xkyWjQ4I ▸ Top stories today via @billdodson88 @chinict @theeiu_china @adamminter China food safety inspection results are 'alarming' - AsiaInspection http://t.co/PAnhL759 China Medical Technologies: Does Missed Coupon Mean Company Will Go Dark? http://t.co/qQ4dxj0Z