Chinese media hit at ‘White House’s Google’

China has signalled a change of approach to the Google crisis, with state media describing the company’s threat to pull out of the country as a political conspiracy by the US government.

Accusations in two newspapers that Washington was using Google as a foreign policy tool were echoed by Chinese government officials on Wednesday.

This comes before a policy speech by Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, on internet freedom on Wednesday, raising the risk that the standoff will damage already testy relations between the two major powers.

Global Times, a nationalist tabloid owned by People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, ran an editorial with the headline: “The world does not welcome the White House’s Google”.

“Whenever the US government demands it, Google can easily become a convenient tool for promoting the US government’s political will and values abroad. And actually the US government is willing to do so,” the piece said.

In an accompanying news story, the paper quoted Wu Xinbo, a political scientist at Fudan University, as saying “the Google incident is not just a commercial incident, it is a political incident”.

China Youth Daily said in its Tuesday edition that some US politicians were trying to promote human rights issues under the guise of a commercial dispute.

“In their hearts, when Google is in trouble that means that western culture is in trouble . . . Using Google to propagate American-style freedom of speech . . . is the real reason that Google chose not to address its problems in the market but through politics,” the paper said.

Chinese papers said a meeting between state department officials and Google executives before the company announced it had been attacked by hackers was an indication that Google had a hidden political mandate.

The reports, and corresponding comments from government officials who refused to be quoted, were a change of tack from Beijing’s previously low-key approach to the Google crisis.

In the past week, the government has tried to avoid a political fallout by treating the issue as a strictly commercial affair, and official media had been advised not to play it up.

But Beijing might have concluded that this strategy was not working. The internet remained abuzz on Wednesday with analysis of the political implications of the Google affair.

In past crises, the government has tried to unite the public behind it by fanning nationalism and stoking criticism of alleged western attempts to humiliate China.

However, analysts suggest this strategy could be difficult in the Google case. “They are testing the waters right now to see if this works,” said an editor at another party-run newspaper.

All traditional news media in China are state-owned and often used to transmit messages the government does not want to announce officially.

The Obama administration should do more to pressure China to open up the internet for its citizens, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, urging the White House to be “as courageous and principled as Google”.

The call came as Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, prepares to make a speech on internet freedom in Washington on Thursday.

“The Obama administration has been disappointing on China because it has not been willing to issue firm protests,” Ken Roth, executive director of the human rights organisation, told the Financial Times.

“The attacks on Google are such a provocation that they are a real test of [the administration’s] stance. If it’s enough for Google to threaten to quit China, we would hope that it would be enough for them to take a stand,” Mr Roth said, as his organisation released its annual report on human rights abuses.

Google has said it will end the controversial censorship of its search service in China and risk being thrown out of the world’s most populous internet market, following what it claimed were China-based attempts to hack into its systems and those of 20 other international companies. This was apparently part of an attempt to hack into the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google discussed its plan with the Obama administration, which is increasingly worried about cyberattacks from China, before making . But critics say the administration has been mealy-mouthed in its response.

“This is a real act of leadership on the part of [Google co-founder] Sergey Brin to give up a clearly lucrative market as a matter of principle,” Mr Roth said. “Will the Obama administration be as courageous and principled as Google?”

Visiting China in November last year, Mr Obama said he was a “big supporter of non-censorship”.

“The more freely information flows, the stronger society becomes,” the president said in response to an online question on what he thought of the great Chinese internet firewall.

In response to Google’s threat, the White House said: “The president and this administration have beliefs about the freedom of the internet . . . The right of a free internet is what many of you heard the president talk about in China.”

Mr Obama’s administration has asked China for an explanation for the “highly sophisticated” cyberattacks but has avoided taking a tougher stand, apparently out of concern for jeopardising broader bilateral relations.

Human Rights Watch urged Ms Clinton to “name names” when she talks about internet freedom.

Governments in countries including Vietnam, Russia and Burma are also tightly controlling the internet, while the regime in North Korea does not allow citizens to have any access to the web at all.

In Iran, Egypt and China, the governments regularly harass bloggers who write posts that attack authorities.

China is sophisticated in the way it censors the internet, Human Rights Watch said, by giving only vague guidelines that lead internet service providers to err on the side of caution and censor more than they might need to.

“I applaud Google for not acquiescing to censorship any more. That political stand may well do more to open up access than anything else,” Mr Roth said.
FT

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