BEIJING – China welcomes foreign Internet companies working in China,but they must respect and abide by the country’s laws, including thoseon expression, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday.
The comments by ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao followed remarks Tuesday by Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledging the Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands.
Liu said China took a positive attitude toward working with companies such as Google, but any cooperation must exist “within a framework of law,” and that Beijing hoped firms would abide by China’s regulations.
Google’s Brin said the Internet company had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country.Google’s China-approved Web service omits politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches, such as details about the June 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square. Its agreement with China has provoked considerable criticism from human rights groups.
“China welcomes foreign Internet companies working in China,but they must respect and abide by the country’s laws, including those on expression”
And as Google is very interested in making profit, they are not going to even mention the possibility of a change. No, they just have “agreed on censorship“.
This comes after China Blocked Google Main site. And the statement from Brin is quite extravagant:
“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles
but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more
effective service,” he said.
“Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense.”
In addition to Google, US companies Microsoft, Yahoo and
Cisco Systems have also been accused of accommodating China’s demands
on censorship in return for access to its huge internet market.
How on earth you are going to provide INFORMATION if it’s blocked?
In fact Roger L Simon has begun a campaign for divestment and Atlas Shrugs, after a magnificent post, has this image:
Pajamas Media has a very good section on this subject.
Related posts on the subject:
Hello,
I’ve enjoyed reading Toasted Bread and wanted to let you know about a new Amnesty International initiative that might be of interest to your readers. We’re launching a new report today detailing how Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other Internet companies have violated their stated corporate values and policies in pursuit of the potentially lucrative Chinese market – see http://www.amnestyusa.org/business/Undermining_Freedom_of_Expression_in_China.pdf
We’ve also created a site badge that you can use to post snippets of censored content to your blog – the more bloggers that participate, the more we can help undermine censorship! Check it out at:
http://irrepressible.info/addcontent
It would be great if you could feature irrepressible.info and the new report on your blog. Feel free to get in touch if you have questions.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks,
Heather Squire, Intern
AI Business and Human Rights
Thanks! Forgive me, till today I have not noticed this comment. I am going to insert this in a new post.
[…] We will see what happens with censorship in YouTube, that has been somewhat normal nowadays. Also it has been a normal policy of Google. […]
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[…] You also remember that Google has made a special censored version of the search engine for Chinese users. Well, looks like that is making the giant firm lose market share: When Google decided to offer a censored Chinese search engine it caused an outcry among the free-speech movement in the US who wondered what the company who had “Do no evil” as a motto was up to. Chinese internet users were equally puzzled, as they saw no reason to visit the censored Google, since they preferred the uncensored one. [Chinese people are more intelligent that is clear…] […]