Google in China: The Big Disconnect

Google in China: The Big Disconnect
Clive Thompson

The World Wide Web, Abridged: Patrons in an internet cafe in Beijing.
Chatting about sports, posting entries to blogs — fine. Visiting
pro-democracy sites — no way.

For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on
the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy
band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears
in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new
head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese
university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the
world, scalpers sold tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of
8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word.

It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China's
high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and
Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before
joining Google last year, he worked for Apple in California and then for
Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company's
research-and-development lab in Beijing. In person, Lee exudes the
cheery optimism of a life coach; last year, he published "Be Your
Personal Best," a fast-selling self-help book that urged Chinese
students to adopt the risk-taking spirit of American capitalism. When he
started the Microsoft lab seven years ago, he hired dozens of China's
top graduates; he will now be doing the same thing for Google. "The
students of China are remarkable," he told me when I met him in Beijing
in February. "There is a huge desire to learn."

Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating
power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field
for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages
are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or
Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or
Harvard and fully educate themselves. Lee has been with Google since
only last summer, but he wears the company's earnest, utopian ethos on
his sleeve: when he was hired away from Microsoft, he published a
gushingly emotional open letter on his personal Web site, praising
Google's mission to bring information to the masses. He concluded with
an exuberant equation that translates as "youth + freedom + equality +
bottom-up innovation + user focus + don't be evil = The Miracle of Google."

When I visited with Lee, that miracle was being conducted out of a
collection of bland offices in downtown Beijing that looked as if they
had been hastily rented and occupied. The small rooms were full of eager
young Chinese men in hip sweatshirts clustered around enormous
flat-panel monitors, debugging code for new Google projects. "The ideals
that we uphold here are really just so important and noble," Lee told
me. "How to build stuff that users like, and figure out how to make
money later. And 'Don't Do Evil' " — he was referring to Google's bold
motto, "Don't Be Evil" — "all of those things. I think I've always been
an idealist in my heart."

Yet Google's conduct in China has in recent months seemed considerably
less than idealistic. In January, a few months after Lee opened the
Beijing office, the company announced it would be introducing a new
version of its search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China's
censorship laws, Google's representatives explained, the company had
agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by
the Chinese government, including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a
government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in
China; or any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. If you
search for "Tibet" or "Falun Gong" most anywhere in the world on
google.com, you'll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat
rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside China on
google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google
will have erased them completely.

Google's decision did not go over well in the United States. In
February, company executives were called into Congressional hearings and
compared to Nazi collaborators. The company's stock fell, and protesters
waved placards outside the company's headquarters in Mountain View,
Calif. Google wasn't the only American high-tech company to run aground
in China in recent months, nor was it the worst offender. But Google's
executives were supposed to be cut from a different cloth. When the
company went public two years ago, its telegenic young founders, Sergey
Brin and Larry Page, wrote in the company's official filing for the
Securities and Exchange Commission that Google is "a company that is
trustworthy and interested in the public good." How could Google square
that with making nice with a repressive Chinese regime and the Communist
Party behind it?

It was difficult for me to know exactly how Lee felt about the company's
arrangement with China's authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our
meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government
relations; only the executives in Google's California head office were
allowed to discuss those matters. But as Lee and I talked about how the
Internet was transforming China, he offered one opinion that seemed
telling: the Chinese students he meets and employs, Lee said, do not
hunger for democracy. "People are actually quite free to talk about the
subject," he added, meaning democracy and human rights in China. "I
don't think they care that much. I think people would say: 'Hey, U.S.
democracy, that's a good form of government. Chinese government, good
and stable, that's a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get
to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.' "
Certainly, he said, the idea of personal expression, of speaking out
publicly, had become vastly more popular among young Chinese as the
Internet had grown and as blogging and online chat had become
widespread. "But I don't think of this as a political statement at all,"
Lee said. "I think it's more people finding that they can express
themselves and be heard, and they love to keep doing that."

It sounded to me like company spin — a curiously deflated notion of free
speech. But spend some time among China's nascent class of Internet
users, as I have these past months, and you begin to hear such talk
somewhat differently. Youth + freedom + equality + don't be evil is an
equation with few constants and many possible solutions. What is
freedom, just now, to the Chinese? Are there gradations of censorship,
better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like
an intolerable question — the end of the conversation. But in China, as
Google has discovered, it is just the beginning.

Cultural Differences

Google was not, in fact, a pioneer in China. Yahoo was the first major
American Internet company to enter the market, introducing a
Chinese-language version of its site and opening up an office in Beijing
in 1999. Yahoo executives quickly learned how difficult China was to
penetrate — and how baffling the country's cultural barriers can be for
Americans. Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail,
because they find the idea of leaving messages to be socially awkward.
They prefer live exchanges, which means they gravitate to mobile phones
and short text messages instead. (They avoid voicemail for the same
reason; during the weeks I traveled in China, whenever I called a
Chinese executive whose phone was turned off, I would get a recording
saying that the person was simply "unavailable," and the phone would not
accept messages.) The most popular feature of the Internet for Chinese
users — much more so than in the United States — is the online
discussion board, where long, rollicking arguments and flame wars spill
on for thousands of comments. Baidu, a Chinese search engine that was
introduced in 2001 as an early competitor to Yahoo, capitalized on the
national fervor for chat and invented a tool that allows people to
create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries. When
users now search on baidu.com for the name of the Chinese N.B.A. star
Yao Ming, for example, they are shown not only links to news reports on
his games; they are also able to join a chat room with thousands of
others and argue about him. Baidu's chat rooms receive as many as five
million posts a day.

As Yahoo found, these cultural nuances made the sites run by American
companies feel simply foreign to Chinese users — and drove them instead
to local portals designed by Chinese entrepreneurs. These sites,
including Sina.com and Sohu.com, had less useful search engines, but
they were full of links to chat rooms and government-approved
Chinese-language news sites. Nationalist feelings might have played a
role, too, in the success Chinese-run sites enjoyed at Yahoo's expense.
"There's now a very strong sense of pride in supporting the local guy,"
I was told by Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American professor of media studies
at the University of Hong Kong.

Yahoo also was slow to tap into another powerful force in Chinese life:
rampant piracy. In most parts of the West, after the Napster wars, movie
and music piracy is increasingly understood as an illicit activity; it
thrives, certainly, but there is now a stigma against taking too much
intellectual content without paying for it. (Hence the success of
iTunes.) In China, downloading illegal copies of music, movies and
software is as normal and accepted as checking the weather online.
Baidu's executives discovered early on that many young users were using
the Internet to hunt for pirated MP3's, so the company developed an
easy-to-use interface specifically for this purpose. When I sat in an
Internet cafe in Beijing one afternoon, a teenager with mutton-chop
sideburns a few chairs over from me sipped a Coke and watched a samurai
movie he'd downloaded free, while his friends used Baidu to find and
pull down pirated tracks from the 50 Cent album "Get Rich or Die
Tryin'." Almost one-fifth of Baidu's traffic comes from searching for
unlicensed MP3's that would be illegal in the United States. Robin Li,
Baidu's 37-year-old founder and C.E.O., is unrepentant. "Right now I
think that the record companies may not be happy about the service we
are offering," he told me recently, "but I think digital music as a
trend is unstoppable."

At first, Google took a different approach to the Chinese market than
Yahoo did. In early 2000, Google's engineers quietly set about creating
a version of their search engine that could understand character-based
Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. By the end of the
year, they had put up a clunky but serviceable Chinese-language version
of Google's home page. If you were in China and surfed over to
google.com in 2001, Google's servers would automatically detect that you
were inside the country and send you to the Chinese-language search
interface, much in the same way google.com serves up a French-language
interface to users in France.

While Baidu appealed to young MP3 hunters, Google became popular with a
different set: white-collar urban professionals in the major Chinese
cities, aspirational types who follow Western styles and sprinkle
English words into conversation, a class that prides itself on being
cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic. By pulling in that audience,
Google by the end of 2002 achieved a level of success that had eluded
Yahoo: it amassed an estimated 25 percent of all search traffic in China
— and it did so working entirely from California, far outside the
Chinese government's sphere of influence.

The Great Firewall

Then on Sept. 3, 2002, Google vanished. Chinese workers arrived at their
desks to find that Google's site was down, with just an error page in
its place. The Chinese government had begun blocking it. China has two
main methods for censoring the Web. For companies inside its borders,
the government uses a broad array of penalties and threats to keep
content clean. For Web sites that originate anywhere else in the world,
the government has another impressively effective mechanism of control:
what techies call the Great Firewall of China.

When you use the Internet, it often feels placeless and virtual, but
it's not. It runs on real wires that cut through real geographical
boundaries. There are three main fiber-optic pipelines in China, giant
underground cables that provide Internet access for the public and
connect China to the rest of the Internet outside its borders. The
Chinese government requires the private-sector companies that run these
fiber-optic networks to specially configure "router" switches at the
edge of the network, where signals cross into foreign countries. These
routers — some of which are made by Cisco Systems, an American firm —
serve as China's new censors.

If you log onto a computer in downtown Beijing and try to access a Web
site hosted on a server in Chicago, your Internet browser sends out a
request for that specific Web page. The request travels over one of the
Chinese pipelines until it hits the routers at the border, where it is
then examined. If the request is for a site that is on the government's
blacklist — and there are lots of them — it won't get through. If the
site isn't blocked wholesale, the routers then examine the words in the
requested page's Internet address for blacklisted terms. If the address
contains a word like "falun" or even a coded term like "198964" (which
Chinese dissidents use to signify June 4, 1989, the date of the
Tiananmen Square massacre), the router will block the signal. Back in
the Internet cafe, your browser will display an error message. The
filters can be surprisingly sophisticated, allowing certain pages from a
site to slip through while blocking others. While I sat at one Internet
cafe in Beijing, the government's filters allowed me to surf the
entertainment and sports pages of the BBC but not its news section.

Google posed a unique problem for the censors: Because the company had
no office at the time inside the country, the Chinese government had no
legal authority over it — no ability to demand that Google voluntarily
withhold its search results from Chinese users. And the firewall only
half-worked in Google's case: it could block sites that Google pointed
to, but in some cases it would let slip through a list of search results
that included banned sites. So if you were in Shanghai and you searched
for "human rights in China" on google.com, you would get a list of
search results that included Human Rights in China (hrichina.org), a New
York-based organization whose Web site is banned by the Chinese
government. But if you tried to follow the link to hrichina.org, you
would get nothing but an error message; the firewall would block the
page. You could see that the banned sites existed, in other words, but
you couldn't reach them. Government officials didn't like this situation
— Chinese citizens were receiving constant reminders that their leaders
felt threatened by certain subjects — but Google was popular enough that
they were reluctant to block it entirely.

In 2002, though, something changed, and the Chinese government decided
to shut down all access to Google. Why? Theories abound. Sergey Brin,
the co-founder of Google, whose responsibilities include government
relations, told me that he suspects the block might have been at the
instigation of a competitor — one of its Chinese rivals. Brin is too
diplomatic to accuse anyone by name, but various American Internet
executives told me they believe that Baidu has at times benefited from
covert government intervention. A young Chinese-American entrepreneur in
Beijing told me that she had heard that the instigator of the Google
blockade was Baidu, which in 2002 had less than 3 percent of the search
market compared with Google's 24 percent. "Basically, some Baidu people
sat down and did hundreds of searches for banned materials on Google,"
she said. (Like many Internet businesspeople I spoke with in China, she
asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from the authorities.)
"Then they took all the results, printed them up and went to the
government and said, 'Look at all this bad stuff you can find on
Google!' That's why the government took Google offline." Baidu strongly
denies the charge, and when I spoke to Guo Liang, a professor at the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, he dismissed the idea and
argued that Baidu is simply a stronger competitor than Google, with a
better grasp of Chinese desires. Still, many Beijing high-tech insiders
told me that it is common for domestic Internet firms to complain to the
government about the illicit content of competitors, in the hope that
their rivals will suffer the consequences. In China, the censorship
regime is not only a political tool; it is also a competitive one — a
cudgel that private firms use to beat one another with.

Self-Discipline Awards

When I visited a dingy Internet cafe one November evening in Beijing,
its 120 or so cubicles were crammed with teenagers. (Because computers
and home Internet connections are so expensive, many of China's mostly
young Internet users go online in these cafes, which charge mere pennies
per hour and provide fast broadband — and cold soft drinks.) Everyone in
the cafe looked to be settled in for a long evening of lightweight
entertainment: young girls in pink and yellow Hello Kitty sweaters
juggled multiple chat sessions, while upstairs a gang of young Chinese
soldiers in olive-drab coats laughed as they crossed swords in the
medieval fantasy game World of Warcraft. On one wall, next to a faded
kung-fu movie poster, was a yellow sign that said, in Chinese
characters, "Do not go to pornographic or illegal Web sites." The
warning seemed almost beside the point; nobody here looked even remotely
likely to be hunting for banned Tiananmen Square retrospectives. I asked
the cafe manager, a man with huge aviator glasses and graying hair, how
often his clients try to view illegal content. Not often, he said with a
chuckle, and when they do, it's usually pornography. He said he figured
it was the government's job to keep banned materials inaccessible. "If
it's not supposed to be seen," he said, "it's not supposed to be seen."

One mistake Westerners frequently make about China is to assume that the
government is furtive about its censorship. On the contrary, the party
is quite matter of fact about it — proud, even. One American businessman
who would speak only anonymously told me the story of attending an award
ceremony last year held by the Internet Society of China for Internet
firms, including the major Internet service providers. "I'm sitting
there in the audience for this thing," he recounted, "and they say, 'And
now it's time to award our annual Self-Discipline Awards!' And they gave
10 companies an award. They gave them a plaque. They shook hands. The
minister was there; he took his picture with each guy. It was basically
like Excellence in Self-Censorship — and everybody in the audience is,
like, clapping." Internet censorship in China, this businessman
explained, is presented as a benevolent police function. In January, the
Shenzhen Public Security Bureau created two cuddly little anime-style
cartoon "Internet Police" mascots named "Jingjing" and "Chacha"; each
cybercop has a blog and a chat window where Chinese citizens can talk to
them. As a Shenzhen official candidly told The Beijing Youth Daily, "The
main function of Jingjing and Chacha is to intimidate." The article went
on to explain that the characters are there "to publicly remind all
Netizens to be conscious of safe and healthy use of the Internet,
self-regulate their online behavior and maintain harmonious Internet
order together."

Intimidation and "self-regulation" are, in fact, critical to how the
party communicates its censorship rules to private-sector Internet
companies. To be permitted to offer Internet services, a private company
must sign a license agreeing not to circulate content on certain
subjects, including material that "damages the honor or interests of the
state" or "disturbs the public order or destroys public stability" or
even "infringes upon national customs and habits." One prohibition
specifically targets "evil cults or superstition," a clear reference to
Falun Gong. But the language is, for the most part, intentionally vague.
It leaves wide discretion for any minor official in China's dozens of
regulatory agencies to demand that something he finds offensive be taken
offline.

Government officials from the State Council Information Office convene
weekly meetings with executives from the largest Internet service
companies — particularly major portals that run news stories and host
blogs and discussion boards — to discuss what new topics are likely to
emerge that week that the party would prefer be censored. "It's known
informally as the 'wind-blowing meeting' — in other words, which way is
the wind blowing," the American businessman told me. The government
officials provide warnings for the days ahead, he explained. "They say:
'There's this party conference going on this week. There are some
foreign dignitaries here on this trip.' "

American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the
government to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they
must censor. They quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead,
the government simply insists the firms interpret the vague regulations
themselves. The companies must do a sort of political mind reading and
intuit in advance what the government won't like. Last year, a list
circulated online purporting to be a blacklist of words the government
gives to Chinese blogging firms, including "democracy" and "human
rights." In reality, the list had been cobbled together by a young
executive at a Chinese blog company. Every time he received a request to
take down a posting, he noted which phrase the government had objected
to, and after a while he developed his own list simply to help his
company avoid future hassles.

The penalty for noncompliance with censorship regulations can be
serious. An American public-relations consultant who recently worked for
a major domestic Chinese portal recalled an afternoon when Chinese
police officers burst into the company's offices, dragged the C.E.O.
into a conference room and berated him for failing to block illicit
content. "He was pale with fear afterward," she said. "You have to
understand, these people are terrified, just terrified. They're
seriously worried about slipping up and going to jail. They think about
it every day they go into the office."

As a result, Internet executives in China most likely censor far more
material than they need to. The Chinese system relies on a classic
psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive
than formal censorship. By having each private company assume
responsibility for its corner of the Internet, the government
effectively outsources the otherwise unmanageable task of monitoring the
billions of e-mail messages, news stories and chat postings that
circulate every day in China. The government's preferred method seems to
be to leave the companies guessing, then to call up occasionally with
angry demands that a Web page be taken down in 24 hours. "It's the
panopticon," says James Mulvenon, a China specialist who is the head of
a Washington policy group called the Center for Intelligence Research
and Analysis. "There's a randomness to their enforcement, and that
creates a sense that they're looking at everything."

The government's filtering, while comprehensive, is not total. One day a
banned site might temporarily be visible, if the routers are overloaded
— or if the government suddenly decides to tolerate it. The next day the
site might disappear again. Generally, everyday Internet users react
with caution. They rarely push the government's limits. There are lines
that cannot be crossed, and without actually talking about it much,
everyone who lives and breathes Chinese culture understands more or less
where those lines are. This is precisely what makes the environment so
bewildering to American Internet companies. What's allowed? What's not
allowed?

In contrast to the confusion most Americans experience, Chinese
businessmen would often just laugh when I asked whether the government's
censorship regime was hard to navigate. "I'll tell you this, it's not
more hard than dealing with Sarbanes and Oxley," said Xin Ye, a founding
executive of Sohu.com, one of China's biggest Yahoo-like portals. (He
was referring to the American law that requires publicly held companies
to report in depth on their finances.) Another evening I had drinks in a
Shanghai jazz bar with Charles Chao, the president of Sina, the
country's biggest news site. When I asked him how often he needs to
remove postings from the discussion boards on Sina.com, he said, "It's
not often." I asked if that meant once a week, once a month or less
often; he demurred. "I don't think I can talk about it," he said. Yet he
seemed less annoyed than amused by my line of questioning. "I don't want
to call it censorship," he said. "It's like in every country: they have
a bias. There are taboos you can't talk about in the U.S., and everyone
knows it."

Jack Ma put it more bluntly: "We don't want to annoy the government." Ma
is the hyperkinetic C.E.O. of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce firm. I met
him in November in the lobby of the China World Hotel in Beijing, just
after Ma's company had closed one of the biggest deals in Chinese
Internet history. Yahoo, whose share of the Chinese search-engine market
had fallen (according to one academic survey) to just 2.3 percent, had
paid $1 billion to buy 40 percent of Alibaba and had given Ma complete
control over all of Yahoo's services in China, hoping he could do a
better job with it. From his seat on a plush sofa, Ma explained
Alibaba's position on online speech. "Anything that is illegal in China
— it's not going to be on our search engine. Something that is really no
good, like Falun Gong?" He shook his head in disgust. "No! We are a
business! Shareholders want to make money. Shareholders want us to make
the customer happy. Meanwhile, we do not have any responsibilities
saying we should do this or that political thing. Forget about it!"

A Bit of a Revolution

Last fall, at a Starbucks in Beijing, I met with China's most famous
political blogger. Zhao Jing, a dapper, handsome 31-year-old in a gray
sweater, seemed positively exuberant as he explained how radically China
had changed since the Web arrived in the late 1990's. Before, he said,
the party controlled every single piece of media, but then Chinese began
logging onto discussion boards and setting up blogs, and it was as if a
bell jar had lifted. Even if you were still too cautious to talk about
politics, the mere idea that you could publicly state your opinion about
anything — the weather, the local sports scene — felt like a bit of a
revolution.

Zhao (who now works in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times) pushed
the limits further than most. After college, he took a job as a hotel
receptionist in a small city. He figured that if he was lucky, he might
one day own his own business. When he went online in 1998, though, he
realized that what he really wanted to do was to speak out on political
questions. He began writing essays and posting them on discussion
boards. Soon after he started his online writing, a newspaper editor
offered him a job as a reporter.

"This is what the Internet does," Zhao said, flashing a smile. "One week
after I went on the Internet, I had a reputation all over the province.
I never thought I could be a writer. But I realized the problem wasn't
me — it was my small town." Zhao lost his reporting job in March 2003
after his paper published an essay by a retired official advocating
political reform; the government retaliated by shutting the paper down.
Still eager to write, in December 2004 Zhao started his blog, hosted on
a blogging service with servers in the U.K. His witty pro-free-speech
essays, written under the name Michael Anti, were soon drawing thousands
of readers a day. Last August, the government used the Great Firewall to
block his site so that no one in China could read it; defiant, he
switched over to Microsoft's blogging tool, called MSN Spaces. The
government was almost certainly still monitoring his work, but
remarkably, he continued writing. Zhao knew he was safe, he told me,
because he knew where to draw the line.

"If you talk every day online and criticize the government, they don't
care," he said. "Because it's just talk. But if you organize — even if
it's just three or four people — that's what they crack down on. It's
not speech; it's organizing. People say I'm brave, but I'm not." The
Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he
seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the
government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense
of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the
Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as
one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways.

One afternoon I visited with Jiang Jingyi, a 29-year-old Chinese woman
who makes her living selling clothes on eBay. When she opened the door
to her apartment in a trendy area of Shanghai, I felt as if I'd
accidentally stumbled into a chic SoHo boutique. Three long racks full
of puffy winter jackets and sweaters dominated the center of the living
room, and neat rows of designer running shoes and boots ringed the
walls. As she served me tea in a bedroom with four computers stacked on
a desk, Jiang told me, through an interpreter, that she used to work as
a full-time graphic designer. But she was a shopaholic, she said, and
one day decided to take some of the cheap clothes she'd found at a local
factory and put them up for auction online. They sold quickly, and she
made a 30 percent profit. Over the next three months, she sold more and
more clothes, until one one day she realized that her eBay profits were
outstripping her weekly paycheck. She quit her job and began auctioning
full time, and now her monthly sales are in excess of 100,000 yuan, or
about $12,000.

"My parents can't understand it," she said with a giggle, as she clicked
at the computer to show me one of her latest auctions, a winter jacket
selling for 300 yuan. (Her description of the jacket translated as "Very
trendy! You will look cool!") At the moment, Jiang sells mostly to
Chinese in other major cities, since China's rudimentary banking system
and the lack of a reliable credit-card network mean there is no easy way
to receive payments from outside the country. But when Paypal — eBay's
online payment system — finally links the global market with the Chinese
market, she says she will become a small international business,
marketing cut-rate clothes directly to hipsters in London or Los Angeles.

Compromises and Disclaimers

Google never did figure out exactly why it was knocked offline in 2002
by the Chinese government. The blocking ended abruptly after two weeks,
as mysteriously as it had begun. But even after being unblocked, Google
still had troubles. The Great Firewall tends to slow down all traffic
coming into the country from the world outside. About 15 percent of the
time, Google was simply unavailable in China because of data jams. The
firewall also began punishing curious minds: whenever someone inside
China searched for a banned term, the firewall would often retaliate by
sending back a command that tricked the user's computer into believing
Google itself had gone dead. For several minutes, the user would be
unable to load Google's search page — a digital slap on the wrist, as it
were. For Google, these delays and shutdowns were a real problem,
because search engines like to boast about delivering results in
milliseconds. Baidu, Google's chief Chines

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer. He frequently reports about technology for the magazine.

Никој не мора да биде негативец

Nobody has to be vile
By Slavoj Zizek

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/print/zize01_.html

Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of
globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite
of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World
Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us
(and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto
Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the
anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and
themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate –
that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It
seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their
impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple
of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings
is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically
refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept
the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we
can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat
it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility,
ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead,
Davos can become Porto Davos.

So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and
George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as
court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today,
they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in
authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with
its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in
disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in
the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being
dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in
dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility
as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial
production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed
hierarchy.

Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’,
the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is
winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his
black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external
discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours,
enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here
is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has
taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.

Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest
or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken
over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of
Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are
not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts
it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days;
collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the
environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success.
Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten
commandments in the French magazine Technikart:

1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright);
just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.

2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.

3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.

4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.

5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult
of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should
collaborate and interact.

6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart,
dynamic, flexible communication.

7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.

8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but
trigger new forms of social collaboration.

9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since
you have more than you can ever spend.

10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the
state.

Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach.
There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be
solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious
fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa
(liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best
in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should
get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage
people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving
things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the
crisis in a creative and unconventional way.

Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large
international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their
companies was as important as the direct political struggle against
apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company,
paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was
a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political
freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive
in post-apartheid South Africa.

Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy
and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an
impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political
illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves
protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order
to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx
say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the
invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what
are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the
internet?

Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good
people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and
irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper
causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed
fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change
the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money). Bill Gates is
already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity,
displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions
of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The
catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it
(or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to
help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so,
and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all
centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that
private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating
their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the
official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the
majority, to help those in need).

Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want
their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned
religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation
(everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the
power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is
social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that
society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their
talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give
something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what
makes business success worthwhile.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who
employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks
and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational,
cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of
steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal
communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US
stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have
constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something
that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate
laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it
is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for
ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent,
humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the
unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half
of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half
to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic
activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which
work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill
Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel
businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual
monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of
saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have
enough to eat?’

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit
is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian
mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries
are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and
so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for
the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition
between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You
export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined,
hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World
locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal
communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible
Third World sweat shops.

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every
true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious
fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state
bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely
because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the
global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is
wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical
alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and
religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what
they are up to.

Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two
opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s
capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the
social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of
excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the
unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic
and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight
subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the
structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of
subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund
education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial
speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the
intolerance he denounces.

--

Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and a (Lacanian) psychoanalyst, is
international director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the
Humanities at Birkbeck. The Parallax View, his latest attempt to
rehabilitate dialectical materialism, comes out in April 2006.









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