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Should U.S. companies support censorship in China?
By Lauren | August 18, 2008
In my last post, I discussed human rights abuses in China and the ethical challenges that the next U.S. President will face in developing a foreign policy to address them. It’s well known that the Chinese government takes a dim view of any kind of criticism, and routinely cracks down on dissidents and protesters who dare to challenge its policies. One of the ways that China maintains its stranglehold on freedom of expression is to spy on its citizens online. It has been estimated that the Chinese government closed down more than 18,000 individual blogs and websites since April of last year, and in August the Chinese censors started shutting down Internet data centers, too. And it’s not as though the abuses stop there; critics of the Chinese government have been abducted and held incommunicado, restricted to house arrest, and even murdered.
What may be less well known, at least in the United States, is that the Chinese government carries out its censorship policies with substantial support from U.S. corporations, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. In other words, companies formed in a country where freedom of speech (and particularly the right to criticize the government) is enshrined in its Constitution are actively helping the Chinese government to stifle the right of Chinese citizens to object to human rights abuses and report them to the rest of the world. It may very well be that these U.S. companies, by helping the Chinese government, have supported the abduction, house arrest or execution of Chinese citizens whose only crime was to speak out against a repressive regime.
How ethical is that?
I recognize that these companies have a legal right to do what they’re doing, and that any refusal on their part to support the Chinese government’s surveillance activities would probably get them kicked out of the country. I also recognize that China is a potential gold mine, that it would be tough to walk away from all that revenue, and that if U.S. companies don’t do business in China companies from other countries undoubtedly will. However, just because U.S. companies can help the Chinese government censor its citizens doesn’t mean that they should. In my opinion, it’s time for U.S. Internet companies to take a long, hard look at their business practices in China, and think about whether the money they’re making is worth the ethical price they pay.
Topics: Business Ethics, Social Ethics, corporate responsibility, ethics |