Google: A Sino-US marker
By Benjamin A Shobert

Across the United States, conversations about politics have not been this charged since the final days of the last presidential campaign. In the space of a week the passage of landmark healthcare reform and Google’s exit from China have made for anxious and animated discussion.

While these two issues are disconnected from one another, they do appear to represent for many Americans significant inflection points relative to historical expectations. On one hand, medical care was formally incorporated into the contract between citizens and the government and no longer was a privilege primarily derived from employment status.

On the other, a large business entity stepped out of a commercial relationship with China in a move designed to show that, regardless of how lucrative the markets in China might be, corporations have responsibilities not only to their shareholders but to those impacted by the use (and abuse) of the technologies they offer.
Consequently, Google’s exit from China has focused increasing light on the question of whether American businesses fully understand the extent to which their operations in China enable and empower a political class whose motives and feelings towards liberalization are less constructive than the West would like. This is not necessarily a new question, but the intensity with which it is being wrestled with is.

In addition, its occurrence at this precise time, amid American economic weakness, increasingly bi-partisan voices crying out for a stronger Chinese currency and overall frustration with China’s global posturing, makes Google’s decision to exit more powerful in symbol and substance. No matter what most Americans think about Google’s decision or China’s response, many now understand quite clearly, and have been reminded of it again this week, the bargain made when America and China opened to one another.

While attitudes towards healthcare reform are markedly divisive and inherently partisan, in general, Americans’ attitudes on Google’s decision have been largely positive. This likely suggests a number of things about the American mood towards China, perhaps most generally an exhausted patience by the average lay person at the costs (both economic and political) of being in a business relationship with Beijing.

The cyber-attacks on Google from within China cross a very clear ideological line in America, a country where most still believe in the sacred idea that governments that seek to stifle personal freedoms are fundamentally incompatible with American values. It would be an overstatement to suggest the average American feels anger towards China about the intrusion into Google’s business, but most feel a growing distrust, coupled to a suspicion that perhaps hopes for political transformation within China are unlikely to bear fruit.

As interviews with Google executives begin filtering out into the media, it’s become increasingly clear that the company always wrestled with, and was never entirely comfortable concerning, the decision it had made to accept limitations on its business inside China. Google’s position was admittedly at an extreme: its technology very directly empowered individuals to access information in a way that promises freedom, self-empowerment and the ability of an individual to rise outside of his place and time to understand the greater context of his life. By placing overtly political limitations on what their technology could return to individuals within China, Google was compartmentalizing much of its mission, a compromise the company never fully believed was the right decision.

China’s politics, always viewed with a wary eye across the US, are now front-and-center as a consequence of Google’s decision. Whatever short-term domestic political or technological advantage those within China hoped to gain by snooping on Google’s systems, they unwittingly focused the world’s attention on the fundamental pretext which has incorporated China into the world’s economy since Tiananmen: if you do business with China, it will liberalize. If the recent feedback is any indication, American attitudes are overwhelmingly in support of Google and increasingly frustrated with China. This is a bad place for US-China relations to find themselves, yet it is not at all clear whether either country will move to intentionally defuse with its own symbolic act what is becoming a very loaded political and cultural moment in the US.

James Mann’s prescient book of several years ago, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression, focused on this very question. Looking forward, Mann asked the question of whether Americans would be comfortable if they found 20 years in the future that we had played a critical role building China into an economic powerhouse, but the country remained an authoritarian regime, incapable and uninterested in fostering dissent, absent political pluralism, and still detached from a system of law that provided for the protection of the individual against the abuses of power.

At the time Mann published his book, some criticized his work for over-emphasizing the remaining communist impulses of China’s leadership instead of acknowledging that whatever political path the country was on, calling it communist was as unhelpful as it was inaccurate. But now, even those who feel Mann’s analysis suffered from being too critical have to admit that Beijing’s intrusion into Google’s business smacks of a country whose policies and practices are unacceptable.

Many mature voices with decades of experience in US-China relations have been quick to point out that, while the relationship is currently strained, this is not the first time, nor will it be the last. Consequently, they caution additional patience in the face of what most acknowledge are moves by Beijing that are inconsistent with the sort of long-term changes they would like to see coming from China.

In the most basic sense, these people are correct. China’s moves, both domestically and internationally, remain halting and not fully thought out, a back-and-forth between liberalization and control that leaves bystanders unclear on the overall direction of reform. The much-referenced concerns over China’s national politics, fears that the leadership needs to keep a precarious balance between a host of factors lest the country erupt into unrest, all combine to make its handling of the Google controversy unnecessarily problematic and heavy-handed.

If anything, Google’s discovery has more to say about American expectations of China’s leadership than much else. For much of the past decade, Americans have read into China’s politics what they have wanted to see. Those who fear the country’s rise can never be convinced Beijing does not harbor impulses to leverage its growing economic power to spread a virulent form of centrally controlled capitalism.

Similarly, those supportive of the country’s changes wrestle to identify how best to balance between encouraging the country’s leaders for the changes they have made without overlooking the still-troubling problems within its political institutions. But across both camps, and interestingly unlike the healthcare bill, reactions to Google’s decision and China’s response have by and large not been marked by hostility or animosity, rather a sense of weariness and reflection.

Most Americans, even those frustrated with China’s handling of the Google case, acknowledge that our economic futures are so intertwined that to extricate ourselves from one another would be so extremely damaging that it verges on the impossible. As a result, their exhaustion is likely to have its limits and stop short of becoming an anger that would empower Washington to begin punitive measures against the Chinese. But what is changing is that Americans are beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, it is time to halt further integration between the two countries, that maybe we should push back and give China a little bit of space to see in which direction it is likely to go.

If this adjusted attitude encourages Americans to become more self-reflective about our own country, its problems and opportunities, then perhaps in the long term the Google controversy can have a constructive outcome. Similarly, if the over-correction by Beijing forces its citizens to cry louder for greater freedom, this could have additional benefits. If, however, this adjustment in how Americans view engagement with China pushes us towards suspicion and distrust, we may well look back on these last two weeks and realize that Google’s decision to leave China was a leading indicator of what was to come for both countries.

Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc (www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm dedicated to helping Asian businesses bring innovative technologies into the North American market.