Comrade Orwell Meets Yahoo! the Stool Pigeon

Morally, you are pygmies.

—Congressman Tom Lantos to Yahoo! executives

In addition to China’s techno-fixes for Internet surveillance, there is an extensive army of “Internet Orwells” to keep an eye out for dissident Net traffic. Astonishingly, these Comrade Orwells number some 30,000 Chinese workers who help monitor Internet blogs and chat rooms. They also collaborate with the police to track down the most egregious offenders. In fact, China leads the world in jailed Internet users.

One highly publicized case further illustrates the complicity of American corporations in Chinese repression. In this case, the Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years for one click of his subversive mouse. What Shi did was to forward an email from the government to a pro-democracy group that ordered the country’s media not to report on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

When China’s Internet Orwells uncovered this email, they pressured Yahoo! to reveal Shi’s identity. Threatened with loss of access to the world’s fastest-growing market, Yahoo! caved quicker than you can say Vichy France.

For ratting out Shi, Yahoo! Chief Executive Jerry Yang was dragged before Congress, called a “moral pygmy,” and forced to issue an apology to Shi’s mother, who sat behind Yang at the hearing. In sharp contrast to Yang’s public shaming, however, Cisco’s Chief Executive John Chambers has received little public scrutiny for his company’s role as chief architect of China’s Great Firewall.

Business executives like Cisco’s Chambers justify their actions with a “when in China, do as the Chinese do” defense. To do business in China, these executives insist, they must comply with local laws. But China’s local laws often force executives to make moral and ethical choices that would be intolerable in the West.

The broader problem is that American business executives have little training in how to deal with ethics in a corrupt and totalitarian global business environment such as China—blame U.S. business schools for that. As a result, moral horizons tend to be short, and executives who find themselves in the heat of a battle don’t know where to draw the line, which is what happened to Yahoo!

What’s missing from the American corporate perspective is this bigger picture: The collaborative tools that U.S. corporations provide to spy on, and silence, the Chinese people are much more likely to help prop up a totalitarian regime than topple it.