China has moved to stir up anti-American sentiments ahead of an expected announcement by the US internet search giant Google that it will shut down its Chinese search engine in a row over government censorship.
Google may shut down its Chinese search engine early next month, according to reports in China Business News
A raft of angry articles and editorials in China's state controlled media repeated accusations of "information imperialism" against the US, branding Google's attempts to force the Chinese government to relax censorship rules as "ridiculous".
"Whether (Google) leaves or not, the Chinese government will keep its internet regulation principles unchanged," said a commentary carried by the official Xinhua news agency.
"One company's ambition to change China's internet rules and legal system will only prove to be ridiculous."
The hostile media coverage comes as Chinese media reports said that Google was planning to announce that it will carry out the threat it made last January to close down its Chinese search operation unless it was allowed to operate free of controls.
China Daily said that it was "ridiculous and arrogant" of the San Francisco-based tech giant to seek to change Chinese government policy, accusing the company of working hand-in-glove with the US government to impose itself on Chinese internal affairs.
"Google's relations with the US government cannot be deeper," the article said.
"How can people believe that the company's search results are without any bias when it lacks independence as well as business ethics?"
The Google row is coming to a head at a time when US-China relations are deeply strained by calls from US politicians to confront China over its undervalued currency, as well as rows over trade and arms sales to Taiwan and Tibet.
A survey by the US Chamber of Commerce in China released on Monday showed a sharp deterioration of business sentiment towards China among US businesses, with 38 per cent now saying they feel "unwelcome" in the Chinese market place, compared with 23 per cent in 2008.
Despite attempts to manipulate public opinion against Google, the departure of the world's leading search engine will come as a major embarrassment to China's government, highlighting to the Chinese public the extent to which it censors internet content.
Sun Zhe, director of the centre for US-China relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University, said that Google's departure would be a blow to China's standing in the wider world and backwards step longer-term process of "opening up" begun 30 years ago.
"It would be too bad. I'm a Google user and I feel bad," he told The Daily Telegraph.
"I think [Chinese internet search leader] Baidu.com and other Chinese search engines cannot compete with Google, certainly not for academic searches."
However he said both Google and the Chinese government were to blame for failing to understand each other's concerns better and allowing relations to deteriorate to the point where Google felt it needed to issue such a public ultimatum.
As well as damaging China's reputation overseas, Google's threatened pullout has alerted many Chinese internet users to the extent to which the government censors content, beyond the social ills of pornography, gambling and violence.
An open letter released by a group of concerned Chinese internet users challenged both Google and the Chinese government to provide more information about the extent and mechanisms of censorship in China.
While supporting censorship to protect the public from anti-social material, the group said that Chinese people had a right to information on issues such as the 2008 powdered milk scandal, health scares and violent evictions – all of which are frequently curtailed by Chinese authorities.
"We cannot accept violation of the public's right to access such public interest information," the group said, citing China's constitution which in theory guarantees such rights, but in practice is often overridden by the demands of "maintaining stability".
No comments:
Post a Comment