Authoritarianism and IF: China's interactions with US internet search companies

With Google's announcement that it may leave China, there has been a spotlight on China's interactions with Internet search services such as Yahoo and Google over the last few years.  In my investigation of the issues I discovered a timeline of privacy invasion incidents, censorship and other events in China's history with the Internet put together by the BBC.  The thing that I found most disturbing was that Yahoo! had been involved in investigations and arrests of several bloggers for the opinions that they shared through Yahoo! services.

I'm not surprised by the censorship of political views by the Chinese government because historically that is how authoritarian governments maintain their power.  Control of political information and opposition viewpoints is a key component to controlling a population and appears anytime a government feels threatened by outside or inside forces.  The thing about China is that it is not the Communist paradigm that is challenged by dissenting opinions it is mostly the current implementation of that paradigm that has significant opposition.  One piece of the current system in China is control over expression which may have once served to control anti-communist rhetoric, but which now controls mostly anti-government and populist opinions.

For example, a skilled tech worker in China will be paid more than most other Chinese workers and encouraged to live in a larger house separated from the rest of the city.  This means that the educated population is not in regular contact with poorer people and has no populist legitimacy.  Many of these same tech workers would prefer to be on a level pay scale with all other Chinese people and are the kind of people who might challenge the current government.  Should one of these people take it upon himself to redistribute the wealth that they earn from working with a western company and live like their neighbors, the government will encourage and threaten until he removes himself from society again.  This means that the most educated and free thinking citizens lack leadership legitimacy and no matter how much they believe in the principles of Communism they cannot challenge the current implementation of it.

This is all to say that China's attempts to control the information access of its population have nothing to do with the particular economic system that they use and more to do with the authoritarianism of the current political structure.  Given this structure, the Chinese government will continue to use any resources they can muster to control the intellectual freedom of its population.  This is not unlike the censorship during McCarthyism or warrantless wiretaps that Bush performed but does raise red flags for the general state of human rights and freedoms in China.

As long as companies such as Google and Yahoo! continue to do business with China according to the invasive and restrictive policies that the government has put into place China will be able to control their population with some international legitimacy.  While it is true that the government run search engine already holds most of the market, the simple protest that Google is finally making may help to encourage better behavior on the part of the Chinese government in the interest of broader commercial power.