China’s stern admonition to Google should worry reasonable citizens of both countries.
Google is perhaps the most successful entity ever to come bombing out of California’s Silicon Valley, with its innocuous motto “Don’t be evil” painted at the head of the behemoth, rushing over the world like some Sunshine State version of a missile-head message.
And Google has tried to make good on the motto. From providing free city-wide wifi in Mountain View, CA where they’re headquartered, to investing in the world’s largest solar power plant with a view toward going carbon neutral, to inventing high-speed internet 100 times faster than regular broadband and supplying it to limited test households, to inventing a car that drives itself so that fewer of us will die on the roads, it’s fair to say that Google has tried to be an agent of good instead of evil.
Sure, there are some privacy concerns over the company’s data monopoly, and there are the conspiracists who think Google is a front for the CIA, or those who think the company is harvesting the world’s information to one day enslave us all. But based on everything we can gauge in the real world, this is highly unlikely.
But now Google’s motto is being turned on them—and by an entity nearly as big: China.
Following Google’s announcement last week of a hack on its Gmail system that targeted US officials including White House employees, China is accusing the tech giant of false allegations, and threatening it to boot.
The Telegraph reports The Communist party run-newspaper People’s Daily Overseas issued a stark warning to Google in a front-page editorial: “Google’s accusations aimed at China are spurious, have ulterior motives, and bear malign intentions,” the paper wrote, and continued to accuse the company of “trying to provoke a new dispute between China and the US.”
This is particularly troubling in light of the Pentagon’s new declaration on cyber security issued just last week, in which it stated new US policy that cyber hacks and acts of information sabotage can be treated as acts of military war.
In what seemed like a dangerous escalation, the paper went on to warn: “Google should not become overly embroiled in international political struggle, playing the role of a tool for political contention. For when the international winds shift direction, it may become sacrificed to politics and will be spurned by the marketplace.”
The statement seems vague by design, and it doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate the message that in a war of information, backed by military enforcement if necessary, China believes it would emerge victorious, and that when such a transition of power dominance takes place (“international winds”), China will squash Google out of existence and finally be rid of a grating adversary.
What’s really troubling here is that a front-page editorial from a state-owned newspaper isn’t an editorial, so much as a policy position.
As countless novels and philosophers have shown us, good and evil are relative terms. It seems like the U.S. and China are escalating (or descending, as the case may be) into the deep freeze of an information-age Cold War, with each side digging its heels in on its own morality. Google, global player that it is, is caught right in the middle.
June 10, 2011 at 5:56 pm, patriot2008 said:
No doubt about it, China is the evil one in this case. Look at what they’re doing in the misnamed South China Sea. China has just warned all other countries and claimants bordering the area that they should stop all oil exploration unless they ask permission from China. China is making a blatant grab for the oil resources there that are next only to Saudi Arabia’s oil reserve. China is now truly acting like an imperial power, and the sooner the rest of the world stops this dictatorial freedom hating money grubbing and totally immoral nation whose idol is only money, the better it will be for the whole world.