The tale of Google in China will soon be seen as a cautionary tale demonstrating that you can’t upset the Chinese government and succeed there and US companies cannot make the rules in China.
Google is now trying its hardest to backtrack and back down from its earlier statements that it would stop censoring searches, in line with the requests of the Chinese government and we suspect is slowly dragging the US government into its hacking claims and counter claims.
The thing is we all know that it was the Chinese government which was trying to hack into the Googlemail of political dissidents. A few years ago China would not have bothered to look for evidence that someone was anti-government, it would have invented any evidence that it required and a court would have gone along with things to convict them. So this must be seen as some form of progress.
China has traveled a long way politically to almost be up to where the US was at Watergate, where it is actually a scandal if a government department breaks the law, rather than being its right. The latest claim in US and European newspapers is that a team of US investigators has proven that the full-scale cyber attack on Google in China was conducted under government control.
So who employs this group of US investigators? The US government? Or Google? Or are they mythical? The story is that a security consultant exploited an unknown security hole in Windows Explorer (we’re sure there are many at any given point) and that the man identified as doing this has worked with two Chinese Universities, which have links with government and military work. Given that every university and large commercial enterprise in China has a government official on its board, then everyone can be accused of working for the government with a good chance of making it stick, with or without it being true.
China’s state news agency has of course denied, more like ridiculed, the rumors of government involvement ‘ but IP addresses do not lie, while on the other hand using an academic server to screen internecine internet activity is a trick as old as the hills, so it proves very little.
Of course the worst thing that Google could do is win this fight and come out with conclusive proof of Chinese Government involvement. The problem that sits behind this Google story and the previous one about Google agreeing to censor its searches, is the fact that China has a different morality from the perceived morality of the US government and China no longer needs the approval of the US for anything it does. It would lose face and never forgive Google.
Given the amount of money China pumped into the US during the banking crisis, China is in the driving seat of this relationship and its pure size and recent dynamism means that the Google’s of this world cannot dominate in China, but equally they cannot flourish without being there.
This is true of every multinational company in the world ‘ and for every company that will behave like Google, and shout long and loud that its rights were being interfered with by government cyber spies, there are five that would comply voluntarily and keep the whole thing quiet on the basis of ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do.’ We don’t see this event damaging Google, but we do see its experiences warning off everyone from going down the route of directly opposing the Chinese Communist Party.
And if any conspiracy films from the last 20 years filmed in the US have any shred of truth in them, then the only thing that the Chinese government is guilty of is getting caught. Like most other governments.
The Chinese government this week said that all of Google’s reports are groundless, and accusations of Chinese government involvement are irresponsible and made out of ulterior motives. Though what those motives could be is tough to imagine, given that this has only made progress in China harder for Google.
The whole thing is being seen as posturing in the run up to talks opening between Google and the government on its future in the country and in Beijing specifically.
Interestingly China is supposed to very soon have more English speakers than America, but as often as this is repeated, it is an urban myth and rote learning the odd English word at school, only gives China the opportunity to say that about itself, without it being meaningful in any way, unlike, say, in India where everyone speaks English fluently.
China is curiously inward looking, so would never truly get the bulk of its people to learn English, and although it may slowly begin looking to annex parts of the world (the efforts of ZTE and Huawei around the world are testimony to this) the truth is that even with 1.3 billion people it is not the largest market for many high technology items at the consumer level, only at the infrastructure level, simply because of the poverty levels of a great many of that population. True, last year China issued the biggest 3G contracts ever, so eventually it will use up more phones, and more top end phones than anywhere else, which demonstrates how its infrastructure success leads onto consumer success. In a single decade China went from being the largest importer of TV sets in the world to the most prolific exporter of TVs, and that kind of progress will one day makes its home grown companies like Baidu, the Google rival there, expect to emerge from inside the country to become a major revenue stream outside of China.
None of that can work right now and Google could afford a stand off with China for some while, before a company like Baidu began to understand and be trusted in the international community and became a threat to Google globally, by growing out of the Asia Pacific region.
Baidu would have to throw off its government imposed censorship when operating outside of China and become relevant internationally by accepting international behavioral standards. In other words it would need to become more like Google.
Right now the Chinese government is obsessed with any company that can help it export its capabilities, but it really only pays this lip service, the same way that it pays lip service to the long term aim of having the largest English speaking workforce in the world. What it really needs to do is complete the creation of home grown powerhouses, secure in their homes markets, first.
So on the one hand Google is helpless in the face of Chinese Government incidents like the hacking fiasco, and on the other it doesn’t need to worry, because until China leaves behind that infantile belief that clandestine is better than out in the open, when it comes to politics, it will never be in the right frame of mind to take on the rest of the world. However Google cannot rely on that being true for too long and needs to make an accommodation with China in order to sow the seeds of Android all over the Chinese landscape, to stimulate future advertising revenues there.