Why Google Finally Saw Red in China

There's no polite way to put this. China is a rogue nation, a military

dictatorship masquerading as a people's government. It is an apparent economic

success in the short term, but its aspiration to become an economic superpower

is not compatible with its political model. That's a system backed not by the

people's will, but by raw military power. The guiding principles are control,

and paranoia. All media, all information, is censored. If you politely disagree

with the system, you are locked up for eleven years, if you're lucky. If you

were in China writing what I am writing here, you would simply disappear.

So when the world's most influential tech company from the world's most

influential nation bowed to this political system and launched a self-censored

Google.cn search in January 2006, it wasn't sustainable. It was also

incompatible with Google's corporate motto, Don't Be Evil. Even with Google's

justification that “increased access to information for people in China and a

more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some

results”.

Search for Tiananmen Square-on Google.com, you get tanks and bloodshed

(http://bit.ly/TMS-reg), but on Google.cn you get flowers and sunshine (http://bit.ly/TMS-ch).

Prasanto K Roy pkr@cybermedia.co.in is Chief Editor of CyberMedia's ICT Publications.

So even if David Drummond's January 12 blog post, “A new approach to China”

(http://bit.ly/Goog-ch) shocked some people, it wasn't completely unexpected.

Google's top lawyer's words were careful: “In mid-December, we detected a

sophisticated attack on our corporate infrastructure... from China... what at

first appeared to be solely a security incident...was something quite

different.” His meaning was clear: the Chinese government was targeting mail

accounts of human rights activists in China. And that it had “routinely

accessed” the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists around the

world.

Google, with 31% of the China Internet search market, isn't number one:

that's Baidu, the home-grown web portal (58% share), and Baidu will be the

biggest gainer if Google pulls out. The Chinese government will be a close

second, getting rid of a potential thorn in its side, albeit one that is

self-blunted. China is an enormous online market, which claims to have jumped

28% in a year to 384 Internet users, powered mainly by a 120 million jump in

mobile Internet users, who reached 233 million.

But that's not all. Time was when Russia wore the mantle of the world's top

rogue hacker nation, but China has overtaken it. (The US, with its NSA, CIA and

other agencies, is more subtle and sophisticated and maybe even more effective

as a hacker nation; Israel is more focused.)

Like the low-intensity conflict on India's borders, China has been waging a

low-intensity cyberwar against India and other nations, against businesses even

as it plays host to them, and against all those that it views as enemies,

including human rights activists and dissidents on its own soil. Multinationals

have chosen to ignore this, trading some discomfort for economic gain. China

continues to bet that as long as it stays below a certain threshold, it will get

away with it. It's a dangerous game that can backfire, and they may have just

crossed that line with Google. But they've pushed the envelope way more with

India. Our national security adviser has admitted only to Chinese attacks on the

prime minister's office; there is no way our military would admit to falling

prey to cyber attacks. The next wars will be fought not with conventional or

nuclear weapons, but in cyberspace. Despite our infotech prowess, India is the

Athens to China's Sparta. We are ill equipped to fight this war.