Tech & Tiananmen Square

Yahoo today had a lawsuit filed against it for aiding the Chinese government in supplying information on dissidents. Why is this important? There are a lot of reasons China is at the center of many events and issues in the world today. China is soon to surpass the US as the world’s largest polluter. China is also due to host the Olympics in 2008 in Beijing, an honor they have been preparing for years. China’s military has been in a process of modernization for over a decade. Hundreds of millions of its people have risen from extreme poverty since the 1980’s. Since then China has adopted what it calls ‘market socialism’, allowing it to participate in global trade. It has had nuclear weapons since 1964. China’s leaders are still Communists, leftovers from a not-so-distant age when the world’s most populous nation was ruled ruthlessly by one man: Chairman Mao Tse Tung. A recent biographer claimed that Mao was responsible for the deaths of over 70 million Chinese, in peacetime. It is not an exaggeration. Still many millions suffer in absolute and dire poverty in China’s eastern provinces. China has become the golden jewel of international capitalism as the world’s largest corporations fight for the right to sell their goods in China. Cigarette manufacturers sell millions of packs while Disney seeks to become a cornerstone of Chinese media and Yahoo and Google provide the Chinese government with computers and heavily regulated internet access. China also has one prized possession the world desperately wants: cheap human labor. How many goods sold in the US have been made in China? How many of those products now are considered unsafe? China’s also has had, for the last ten years, the world’s fastest growing economy, at almost 8% steady growth in GDP each year. The US is happy when it reaches 2%. What does this really mean for the future? Well, the world is changing. As Yahoo is brought to court, new precedents are set. Will technology aid oppression or fight it? Will Yahoo only follow the money, as international diamond companies did (and sometimes still do) in Africa, supplying women around the world with ‘blood diamonds’? Is access to the internet in China worth the government’s heavy-handed control? Consider the sacrifices of student demonstrators in June 1989, as thousands of protestors were brutally oppressed by China’s military as other Communist governments in Eastern Europe fell. One image always comes to mind to those who saw these events unfold on CNN: the Chinese man who refused to move when tanks stormed the square. Blocking them with his body, he became the symbol for resistance to cruelty around the world. Inside China, however, the crackdown had its desired impact. Even now, almost twenty years later, Yahoo and others are helping the government keep the voice of the people down. So what’s the future look like for China? Some believe democracy is inevitable. Others believe that globalization in China (and India) will tip the balance of power in the world. Still others believe China may become, eventually, a military threat. It does have one of the world’s oldest cultures. It’s influence is growing in Africa, South America and the Middle East. What we know now is that this court decision involving Yahoo will set an important example.