There are others better placed than me to speculate on the likely business fortunes of a Facebook China (cf. Epstein, Bishop), but what really interests me are the communication challenge and reputational consequences. Some glimpse of those possible consequences came in a Wall Street Journal article about Facebook’s lobbying efforts that ran yesterday. It included the following:

[Facebook] is talking with potential Chinese partners about entering the huge China market, where the government has been cracking down on dissidents. That crackdown has come in response to the uprisings shaking authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, movements that have used U.S.-based social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter as organizing tools.

“Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.

Yowza! Better work on those talking points and come up with something that doesn’t sound quite so paternalistic. Read as generously as possible, this is one quote from what one presumes was a larger discussion on the issues of running transnational social networks in countries with different approaches to censorship and freedom of speech. Read less generously, it sounds like a lobbyist for Facebook arrogating to his client the responsibility to decide what constitutes an appropriate amount of free speech in any given country. Risky territory.

From a business point of view deciding an appropriate amount of free speech might be a practical necessity. From a public communication point of view it’s dangerous. Five years ago, when Facebook was still a plucky upstart too trivial to be noticed, Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Microsoft were hauled in front of a congressional hearing to testify on their activities in China and their willingness to accommodate governments with illiberal approaches to free speech. It was not a banner moment for the American Internet industry. “Moral pygmies!” declared Tom Lantos, the principal congressional antagonist. Much of the cast has changed and Tom Lantos has since died, but the issue remains sensitive. (Not all the cast has changed. Facebook’s current head of communication, Elliott Schrage, represented Google in the 2007 hearings.)

Facebook itself has not committed publicly to anything in China. They also haven’t yet committed any of the blunders that those four firms did (most notoriously Yahoo, with the Shi Tao affair). Finally, Facebook hasn’t made nobility a part of their brand in the way that Google conspicuously did in its early days, something that was used against Google in its China engagement. In fact, if anything Facebook is known for a kind of calculating amorality that may be useful in the ruthlessly sharp-elbowed Chinese Internet world.

But what’s important here is not how Facebook sees itself, but rather how people at large see it, and how activists and politicians think they can use it to drive their own agendas. Whether Facebook likes it or not, it has been publicly associated with recent events in the Middle East and is widely seen as a force for enabling dissidents and protestors whose causes resonate with western publics and politicians. See for example New York Times stories here, here and here. Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell might ridicule the notion of social media as democracy tools, but that won’t necessarily dispel a belief that was made clear in the 2007 hearings: American Internet firms should represent American values.

Companies’ decisions about China are revealing. Facebook’s decision on whether or not to formally enter China will be especially interesting. It will establish something fundamental about the identity of one of the two most powerful Internet companies on the planet. Is Facebook, as some have supposed, the great enabler of democracy? Or is it a company of business pragmatists willing to censor (or delegate censorship) in order to open a potentially lucrative market? The reality is probably more nuanced than either of those positions, but as far as public perception goes it will be difficult to have it both ways. How does one balance groups of stakeholders with completely incompatible views on what constitutes a responsible and conscientious Internet firm?

The nut of the problem is that, right or wrong, democracy activists, American politicians and the Chinese authorities all tend to see American Internet firms as standard bearers for western values. Facebook’s task is to convince the Chinese authorities otherwise while not making activists or western users in general feel betrayed. I can think of few more precarious communication challenges. The quote above is an unpromising start.

Update:

Obama hosted a town hall at Facebook HQ yesterday. Interesting. And likely to be noticed here in Beijing.

See also:

• The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Seeking Friends in Beltway
• Austin Ramzy in Time’s Global Spin blog: Will Facebook Censor for a Shot at the Chinese Market?
• Bill Bishop’s Digicha: Facebook, China PR and Defining “Too Much Free Speech”
• Gady Epstein in Forbes’ Beijing Dispatch: Facebook China? What Would the US Say About It?
• Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker: Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted
• The Guardian: Evgeny Morozov: How Democracy Slipped Through the Net
• The New York Times: US Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings
• The New York Times: Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts
• The New York Times: Ethical Quandary for Social Sites
• The New York Times Bits blog: Obama and Facebook in Warm Embrace
• The Wall Street Journal: Yahoo’s Lashing Highlights Risks of China Market (2007)
• Rebecca MacKinnon’s RConversation: Yahoo! Execs Called “Moral Pygmies” in Congress (2007)

Previously on Imagethief:

• Could better PR have prevented Groupon’s China gaffe?
• A handy cheat-sheet for interpreting the Google China story

A couple of quotes in particular grabbed my attention. The first was this:

[The extraordinarily rigorous grooming and selection of candidates] is in line with the P.A.P.’s style of single-party governance: long-term decisions made by an inner circle, without the distractions of a substantial opposition or the time pressures of electoral deadlines. Public debate can make issues “harder to solve,” the prime minister said this month.

“I would say that our concerns about adversarial politics is why we feel that it’s good for us to have the P.A.P. as a broad-based party representing many views and having some of these trade-offs and tensions resolved within the party rather than between parties,” he said.

Asked whether there were not 20 people equally qualified to run against the P.A.P., Matthias Yao, who is retiring as a member of Parliament after four terms in office, said, “If we did have 40 good people, why not put them in one team, not two teams, when the other half by definition must oppose what the first team is doing?”

The last line is a pretty good summation of the governing philosophy of the PAP. It shows why, despite nominally operating in a multiparty democracy, the PAP is in some ways more similar to the Communist Party in China than an American political party. The idea of adversarial parties testing each other through opposition in public forums is anathema, and differences on policy are seen as best resolved within the party.

The second quote I noticed was this:

In the five years since the last election, the governing party has had “tea sessions” with more than 260 prospects, sometimes traveling abroad if these individuals had overseas jobs, Education Minister Ng Eng Heng, a senior party member, said in a recent forum.

“We didn’t always tell them why we were talking to them,” he said. “There were some tea participants whom we saw through changes in jobs. Some got married, pregnant, delivered. We saw them in various forms, antepartum and postpartum.”

At first I had no idea why he was on about pregnant candidates and ante-partum this and post-partum that. Mrs. Imagethief, who is Singaporean and has been both antepartum and postpartum herself, immediately cleared me up. “He’s sending a message. It’s OK to be a mom and have a career.” In hindsight this was so obvious that I wanted to smack myself. Singapore has such a ridiculously low birthrate they they even wrote us a check for our goofy, halfbreed son (immediately deposited in his college fund, which, at current interest rates, will be just fat enough to pay for one term of vocational night school by 2087).  Mrs. Imagethief made clear that despite the honorable Mr. Ng’s blessings, she had no plans to run for office. But good to see that the officials are all on message.

I find reading about the PAP’s selection process illuminating. Google should study up, because it makes their notoriously grueling candidate screening process look wimpy and cursory by comparison. Also, the article mentions the 27 year old PAP candidate, Tin Pei Ling, who’s youth seems to be becoming a bit of an issues-management case for the PAP. The painfully earnest video in which she introduces herself and her life experience, and which, among other things, has earned her much criticism on Singapore’s corner of the Internet, is on YouTube here.

Goofy, but subsidized.

But stick with me, because that’s the point. The fact is that everyone and their goldfish has an opinion on Google’s fortunes in China, but few people actually know anything conclusive, so what we’re getting is a huge dose of punditry, analysis and opinioneering. This is the kind of thing that PR people live for, because what we’re witnessing first hand is the creation of a narrative. Or, rather, several narratives that serve different worldviews, audiences and points of view.

This is PR in action: The effort to influence perception and opinion with regard to an entity or event, generally with the objective of supporting some kind of end-state result (higher sales, a political victory, popular consensus, the launch of a war, etc.).

PR people are often accused of being liars. This is a shame, because a good PR person doesn’t lie or make up facts. I’d like to tell you this is because PR people are noble souls who want only the best for the planet and fuzzy puppies, but the real reason is that lying makes you vulnerable and doesn’t usually work very well (and, yes, it’s also wrong). Lies can often be proved false, and this can cause your position to unravel pretty quickly, often with devastating consequences. Even if you string the lie out long enough to achieve a stated objective, you’ll take damage on the backside if your story comes apart. See, for example, weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq war, which claimed the reputations and legacies of many people.

But PR people do often try to interpret the facts (or obscure them) in specific in selective ways. In the vernacular, we spin things. In fact, the very term “spin doctor” (sometimes credited to the novelist, Saul Bellow) refers to trying to define the interpretation of events or facts — to determine which way they “spin” in the public sphere.

PR people do this for a living. But we’re not the only ones who do it. Anyone with an agenda tries to interpret facts to create a narrative that serves that agenda, or that serves their world view. Often, dueling parties compete to establish the defining narrative of a situation or event. Consider how Democrats and Republicans competed to establish the narrative for health care reform in the interest of divergent political objectives. The media and public spheres of discussion are thus, often, noisy and squawky collections of competing narratives interpreted or distorted from the same basic set of facts in order to serve different agendas. Sometimes it takes a long time for a “definitive” narrative to emerge. Sometimes a definitive narrative never emerges, or different audiences arrive at divergent narratives because they’re exposed to different influences (anyone who looks at how Chinese and Western audiences fail to see eye-to-eye on many issues will be familiar with this).

This is essentially what has been happening with Google over the past few weeks, as people have competed to establish different narratives regarding its withdrawal from China. There has been a huge amount written and said about Google’s predicament and options in both the Chinese and Western media and blogospheres. At last count I had 27 articles bookmarked since the announcement that Google would shift it’s Chinese search operation to Hong Kong. And there were plenty that I didn’t bother to bookmark.

Well, that’s just too much damned stuff to analyze, and I am way too lazy to pore through it with a notebook and try to draw any meaningful conclusions about what it all means (hey, I don’t get paid for this). Also, my overwhelming impression is that there is so far roughly zero consensus on what it all means.

What I did do, however, was to put together a handy chart that shows the key known facts, and, based upon all the articles I’ve read, how each of the major interest groups that I observe is spinning or reacting to each of those facts. In each case, the vertical thread through the series of facts creates the skeleton of a narrative. And that’s what each of these parties –Google, its rivals, the Chinese government, the Western activist community– is trying to do: They’re each trying to control and define the narrative of Google’s situation in China to serve their own agendas. They are, in other words spinning. Here is what the result looks like:

I realize this is a vast oversimplification and there are no doubt various interests omitted, but this captures most of the main parties and facts. What’s not included here is any kind of conclusion of each narrative. In my opinion, the story is still unfolding and its too early for that. But we’ll see how things go over the next few weeks.

The other thing is that these narratives aren’t in equal competition. To use a possibly inappropriate military metaphor, there are different theaters of operation in which the stakeholder have varying levels of influence. So, in the US, Google and the activist (and analyst) community are the loudest voices. in China, the Chinese government has the tools to define the public narrative, and has been using them liberally, although there is some ferment in the margins (also here).

Eventually, there will be a canonical version of Google’s misadventures in China. or at least one canonical version in the West and one in China. These may not be the creation of a single group. One group might control interpretation of one element of the story, and one group control another. But for the moment, the fun is in watching the battle to own the story. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Finally, from a PR perspective, there is possibly one overarching lesson that can be drawn from this whole situation. I can’t take credit for this insight, it comes from Craig Adams, a colleague of mine. But it’s deceptively straightforward and I agree with it wholeheartedly. He said that if you have to sell out your basic principles to do business in China, that’s a pretty good sign you should reconsider your plans.

Other sources (just to prove I’ve done my homework):

• Official Google Blog: A new approach to China: an update
• After China Move, Google Faces the Fallout – NYTimes.com
• Rio Tinto Is and Google Refused To Be, Corrupt, Rule of Law in China (Asian Healthcare Blog)
• G-Day: Letter from China : The New Yorker
• Billionaire linked to Rio Tinto bribe case | Stuff.co.nz
• FT.com / China – Redirection of users ‘just a little trick’
• RConversation: China, the Internet and Google: my uninvited testimony
• An Interview with David Drummond of Google – Science and Tech – The Atlantic
• Google Braces for Fallout in China – WSJ.com
• Stance by China to Limit Google Is Risk by Beijing – NYTimes.com
• Silicon Hutong: The Google Shuffle and the Hong Kong Twist
• China Kowtows To Nobody, Especially Google – Forbes.com
• Stance by China to Limit Google Is Risk by Beijing – NYTimes.com
• Google’s China Site Redirect Was Pretty Clever, Actually (Silicon Alley Insider)
• Google’s unwise move to Hong Kong – How the World Works – Salon.com
• Letter from China: Life Without Google : The New Yorker
• Brin Drove Google to Pull Back in China – WSJ.com
• Google Searches for a Foreign Policy – NYTimes.com
• Three Google / China Follow-Ups – Science and Tech – The Atlantic
• China Unicom Dumps Google from Android | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD
• China says Google breaks promise, totally wrong to stop censoring (Xinhua)
• Google Would Remind My Grandpa of the Arrogant White Invaders – China – Gizmodo
• Heard on the Street: On Rio Tinto and Google in China – WSJ.com
• Google Official Calls for Action on Internet Restrictions – NYTimes.com
• How China’s internet generation broke the silence | World news | The Guardian
• Goodbye Google and GM information (China Daily)

Previously:

Google detonates the China corporate communications script (January, 2010)

Note: Table slightly updated to correct “mainland” to “Greater China”.

A quick pointer to an excellent post at the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog, which busts several myths concerning Google in China that have been widely repeated in the past few days, including those concerning the health of Google’s business in China, whether or not they already uncensored search results here, and more. From Beijing-based correspondent Sky Canaves (@skycita), showing once again that, if you want to know what’s going on in China, talk to someone who’s here.

The first half of the post discusses alleged hacking attempts on Google, apparently with the aims of both recovering Google source code and accessing the Gmail accounts of dissidents. But the second half of the post is more interesting. The money grafs below (emphasis mine):

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

No doubt a great deal has transpired behind the scenes in the lead up to this announcement. To save time, here’s what I don’t know:

• Whether this is linked to rumors of Google’s possible withdrawal from China and staff exodus that circulated several weeks ago.
• The relative weights of the hacking issue, censorship issue and Google’s business struggles in China in leading the company to make this statement.
• What, if any, discussions Google had with Chinese authorities prior to making this statement (they speak of discussions “over the next few weeks”), or whether there are actually continuing negotiations.
• Whether recent blocks of Google Docs and Google Groups in China contributed to this decision.
• Whether Google would have done this if their business in China was stronger. China contributes a minuscule portion of Google’s revenue.
• What will actually happen to Google’s business in China in the long run.

Here is what I do know:

Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it. In China, foreign companies tend to be deferential to the authorities to the point of obsequiousness, in a way that you would almost certainly never encounter in the United States or Europe. Scan any foreign company’s China press releases and count the number of times you see the phrase, “commitment to China”. Demonstrating “alignment with the Chinese government’s agenda” is an accepted tenet of corporate positioning and corporate social responsibility work in China. This is testament to the degree of direct power that the Chinese authorities wield over the fortunes of foreign businesses in China. Even when foreign companies are in dispute with the Chinese government they tend to offer criticism obliquely as long as they have a business stake or operations in the country. Note, for example, the scrupulous diplomacy of Rio Tinto’s communications concerning the detention of its employees last summer, a far more serious situation than anything Google has encountered (although also with far more money at stake).

In this situation Google has undertaken a bet-the-farm confrontational communications approach in China. They will not have made this decision lightly. Dressed up in the polite language above is what is essentially an ultimatum: Allow us to present uncensored search results to our Chinese users or we’ll walk. The Chinese government is not likely to cave to an ultimatum from a foreign company, no matter how decorously delivered. As Richard Waters of the FT has pointed out, the language does leave some wiggle room for further negotiation. However, Imagethief cannot imagine a circumstance in which the Chinese government will give Google free reign, especially in the current, highly restrictive climate for Internet services. Barring some surprising developments, the clock would therefore appear to be ticking for Google.cn, if not Google’s overall operations in China. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Would Google continue with an office in China if there was no Google.cn site? They could still conduct R&D here, for instance. But Google’s R&D operations in China have been troubled (remember the Sogou IME scandal?) and if the security issues are taken at face value continuing operations here in the absence of a local business to support might simply be extra risk. Consider how many China R&D operations are “PR&D”, designed to demonstrate that essential “commitment to China” in support of a revenue-generating business in China. It’s not that real R&D doesn’t happen here, but how many companies do high-level, primary R&D in China in the absence of an on-shore business and supporting government relations program? And could Google attract talent to a pariah operation? Distraught Chinese netizens are already laying flowers at Google’s China headquarters.

The Wall Street Journal’s story (sub) on the unfolding situation makes some interesting points (emphasis again mine):

The common assumption, however, is that no matter how onerous the limitations and challenges faced by foreign companies in China, the market is too big and important to walk away from.

That calculation has forced a number of foreign firms to accept conditions in China that they might not tolerate elsewhere. The country has 338 million Internet users as of June, more than any other country.

Google would be the most high-profile Western company in recent years to draw a line under the kind of compromises it is prepared to make and walk away from China.

It would be an extremely rare case of a foreign company taking a stand on human rights, and placing that issue over commercial considerations. A number of foreign companies exited China after the Chinese army crushed student protesters around Tiananmen Square in 1989. But they mostly came back in the following years.

A Google withdrawal would also be an implicit rejection of the argument made by many technology companies that their presence in China overall helps expand access to information for Chinese citizens, despite censorship.

That’s the very last line in the story, but I found it one of the most interesting. If you followed the original justifications offered by many American Internet companies for launching businesses in China, or the congressional hearings on the matter in 2006, you will recall that the argument that even a censored presence in China improved access to information for Chinese Internet users was central. If Google repudiates that argument it will put pressure on other American Internet firms currently toeing the regulatory line in China, especially Microsoft, and weaken one of their core public arguments for a continued presence in China. Then again, it may also represent an opportunity for them. After all, “Google” doesn’t phoneticize well in Chinese, as the flap over the “谷歌” brand demonstrated. But “Bing” works quite nicely indeed.

This only the latest chapter –albeit potentially a critical one– in the very interesting story of Google in China. Someone needs to write the book. Anyone want to step forward for that?

See also:

• Rebecca MacKinnon’s roundup of responses.
• James Fallows’ analysis on how this development fits into a broader picture of increasingly tense economic relationships for China.
• Sarah Lacy in TechCrunch, citing tweets from both Bill Bishop (@niubi — now also blogging again at Digicha) and Marc van der Chijs (@chijs).
• Brief US State Department statement.
• CNBC interview with David Drummond (Video – also embedded below): “We’re not saying one way or the other whether the attacks were state sponsored…” Note also the silly use of the word, “cyberterrorists” by the interviewer.
• Brief, relatively straightforward report from the People’s Daily online (Chinese).
• Chinese telecoms analyst Xiang Ligang calls it “psychological warfare”, doesn’t think Google will pull the trigger, and doesn’t think it will be a cataclysm if they do (if I read it correctly – Chinese).

Updates:

• On the corporate communications aspect, this quote from Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Center, in a Mercury News story (via Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine):

“In a world in which we are so used to public relations massaging of messages, this stands out as a direct declaration. It’s amazing,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

• Jeremy Goldkorn (of Danwei) at the Guardian:

The fallout will be interesting. I can’t recall a single case of a major international company with operations in China taking a stand like this. As someone who agreed with Google’s reasoning when it entered China, I also support this move. If it cannot operate here in accordance with its global standards, it should leave. I have given up on getting my own website unblocked by the government and am resigned to the fact that it’s only accessible to people who are outside China or know the technical tricks to get over the Great Firewall.

I’d rather be outside the wall and free than inside it with the icy hand of the censor around my throat.

• Wired’s “Threat Level” blog on some of the considerations within Google (via @kaiserkuo).
• Full disclosure: Imagethief is a supporter of foreign Internet services operating in China. Elaboration in this comment, below, in response to a point from a reader.
• Isaac Mao’s open letter to Google (English), via Harvard’s “Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw” blog.
• Xinhua English report on the statement: “‘It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows,’ the official said.”
• Gady Epstein’s column on Forbes.com: “Dreams of Internet openness in China appear to be a fantasy.” Indeed.
• Evgeny Morozov punctures the feelgood balloon at Foreign Policy: “If…you believe that [Google] did the right thing in China by offering their limited service (rather than no service at all), I don’t see how this move could make you feel good…”

It all fit the model of the crusading online journalist/blogger quite nicely. Fame, fortune and –who knows?– perhaps even hot chicks beckoned. Then Zola decided he was going to take a crack at Google, and his fortunes took a turn for the worse.

In what seems to be a move taken from the Michael Moore playbook, Zola showed up at Google’s Haidian R&D office in Beijing armed with a video camera and confronted a security guard and then a receptionist about a customer service problem. The gist of his complaint appears to be that he was victimized by click fraud and then, in resolving that, shortchanged about seventy bucks he claims he was owed by Google. Neither the bemused security guard nor the Google receptionist was much help. The security guard palmed Zola off onto the receptionist (possibly the best move he made that week) and the receptionist alternated between futile attempts to steer Zola into Google’s normal online customer service channels and sullen silence.

Zola posted a ten-minute video of the confrontation on YouKu, which Bingfeng kindly posted a link to. It’s in Chinese, but a rough English transcript can be found on Reading China.

If Zola was expecting to be lauded for putting a burr up Google’s ass, he was, as we used to say in college, on crack (I was going to say “in high school” but I went to high school before the crack epidemic). He was instead pretty ruthlessly savaged in comments to his blog and on the YouKu video. The situation appears to have been aggravated by a bout of petulance over lack of public appreciation for his efforts in the Xiamen PX incident and an admirably honest but image- tarnishing confession that, really, he’s just in it to get famous.

China blogger and commenter-at-large Feng37 was helpful enough to send me a rough translation he did of some of the harsh criticism being launched in Zola’s direction. Here are three consecutive beauties in Chinese and English from Zola’s Bullog blog:

4 支持
[匿名] 火星 @ 2007-6-19 16:24:49
你直言不讳求名求钱，足够坦诚。但你动机如此纯粹，作为公民记者，不免让人对你的职业操守和诚信额度担心。

you’re straight up about wanting fame and money, that’s honest enough. But if your motives are so pure, as a citizen reporter, people can’t help worry about your professionalism, personal integrity and honesty.

[匿名] emlary @ 2007-6-19 23:08:47
网上那么多骂你的人，看来你离出名不远了，不知道你对客服是怎么理解的，不过看来在你之前已经有很多人去过google公司了，对于一点小事就睚眦必报，你觉得真的有这个必要吗？
So many people cursing you out on the internet, it looks as though you’re not too far away from getting famous. I don’t know what your understanding of customer service is, but it looks as though many people have been to Google before you…do you really think it’s necessary to get revenge and report on something to small and irrelevant?

[匿名] 给你一个警告 @ 2007-6-19 23:21:34
你太SB了，小子北京不是你想进就进的更不是你想出就出的
You stupid little cunt, Beijing isn’t a place you can just walk into when you feel like it and leave when you want.

And it gets worse. It’s hard being a celebrity, isn’t it?

As Feng37 pointed out, Bullog does not allow blog owners to delete comments (an interesting and debatably worthy policy). His new blog, http://www.alouz.com/, does allow that, and I am told he’s been making use of that function to purge the unfavorable comments.

In our communications about this issue, Feng37 asked me what advice “a PR 高手” (flattering, if perhaps a tad exaggerated) such as myself would give to Zola at this stage. I am sucker for this kind of challenge, so as much as I hate to be the john to Zola’s media whoring I am going make some suggestions. This is free advice and it’s worth every penny Zola has paid for it.

1) It’s not about you

You were in a good situation when you were covering the Chongqing nailhouse story. You had a sympathetic subject colorfully personified in Wu Ping, a relatively clear villain in the sinister developers, and a nicely unfolding drama that encapsulated a serious issue facing China. The Xiamen PX case had much the same drama and similar social relevance. Then you followed up these two immense dramas by going to Google to complain about seventy bucks they owe you. Spot the inconsistency.

By making yourself the focus of what was a comparatively trivial complaint, you also made yourself look petty and unsympathetic. People are generally not interested in sympathizing with the observer, but with the subject. If you wanted to complain about Google’s customer service, you should have found someone else trapped in their Kafkaesque customer service maze and gone to bat for that person. It’s OK for you be manipulative, that’s part of the art form, so pick someone as tragic and photogenic as you can find. A cancer-stricken orphan with a website, for instance. But you need to channel someone else’s misery, not your own. That enables you to remain comfortably heroic.

2) Pick your villains carefully and don’t humanize them any more than you have to

Google could make a good villain, heaven knows. In the space of three years they have gone from the plucky little startup everyone was rooting for to sprawling, secretive and vaguely sinister monolith that could be the next Microsoft assuming Microsoft knew every little thing about you right down to what kind of p*rn gets you off. But not everyone hates Google. They still have a lot of fans even here in China. Furthermore, it is possible to make a naturally unsympathetic entity (and Google has definitely become that) sympathetic by personifying it in a way that undermines your crusade. In this case, Google was personified by the receptionist who was clearly totally unable to resolve your situation no matter how much you harangued her. In the end I felt sorrier for her than I did for you (although this whole episode revealed some issues for Google China as well — more on that later). The lesson is to go after people who represent power or who are actual gatekeepers for power (like, gulp, their PR people). Next time pick on Kaifu Lee.

3) Grow a thick skin

As they say, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. If you’ve already confessed that your motive is fame then you better be prepared for the reality that just because people know who you are doesn’t necessarily mean they will like you. And the more you appear to be shamelessly self promoting, the more people will naturally lean toward disdain. Think Furong Jiejie, who never seemed to realize that the joke was on her and ended up being famous (briefly) and unintentionally tragic and embarassing. You don’t want your fame to be of the car-wreck variety.

But even if you are at your best, people will criticize you for any of a number of reasons. Suck it up, dude, and show some confidence. Soak up the criticism and, indeed, revel in it. The price of being a lone crusader is being lone crusader. Show some spine and treat the unbelievers as gnats unworthy of swatting. And remember your basic blogging etiquette: Don’t delete comments or posts if it can be avoided. Consider the fact that controversy on your websites will attract readers and that perhaps you should be cultivating it.

4) Never forget that the Internet is the lowest rung of celebrity

American radio star Howard Stern once said that radio was the lowest rung of the celebrity ladder (and as someone who used to work in radio, I empathize). Fortunately for him, the Internet has finally given him someone to look down upon. Audiences are fickle and celebrity is volatile and often short-lived. That’s especially true of Internet celebrity, which lends itself to transient, “flavor of the moment” fads and freakshows (see Furong Jiejie, above). Durable Internet celebrity is surpassingly rare. We’re all disposable on the Internet. Sucks, doesn’t it? In 1968 a smart man named Andy Warhol said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” He may have envisioning an Internet-powered world like the one we live in today. Or he may simply have been on dope. It was 1968, after all. But the essential truth of the statement remains. It is important, therefore, not to let Internet celebrity go to your head. Whatever else, don’t act like a movie star until you actually become one.

5) If you’re going to make it about you, consider the value of irony

OK, so maybe you’re going to ignore that first piece of advice and make it about you. There is a way it can be done. I note that the front page of your new website has a picture of you gazing into a mirror while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with–a picture of you. I desperately hope this is meant to be a gentle bit of self-satire. Because if it’s not self-satire then you really are headed for same lonely, post-Warholian purgatory currently inhabited by William Hung (look him up).

If you are willing to mock yourself, then you can ignore most of the rules above. But you then need to recognize that your mission has changed from citizen journalist to comic entertainer. Not everyone has the fortitude to make a career out of irony or self-ridicule, and my guess is that’s not what you want. So think it over carefully because this route will take 100 percent commitment, and it will be hard to mix with the kind of stories that got you notoriety in the first place.

Reflect upon Mr. Moore

I mentioned crusading film-maker Michael Moore on purpose. In crafting this advice, I considered quite a bit what makes Mr. Moore successful. He seems to be in the mold to which you aspire (metaphorically speaking — I don’t think you’ll ever be that big). Michael Moore is an utterly polarizing artist, but whether you love him or hate him he is undeniably a hit. Moore injects himself into his stories, but he is never the subject, only a conduit or engaged observer of someone else’s plight. He chooses his villains wisely (from an American perspective), knowing that his choices will generate controversy that will attract attention. And he is teflon-coated when it comes to criticism. Millions of people hate him. But millions also love him and he is world famous.

So that’s my advice. It is offered constructively. I think China benefits from having citizen journalists, and I encourage you to keep at it and get world famous. Don’t take the media-whore comment too seriously. You’ve already confessed. And, after all, many of us in the blogging and PR biz are media- whores ourselves. We can all whore together. That is what the Internet is all about, isn’t it?

That doesn’t sound like PR advice…

Readers may be thinking to themselves that the above is more advice on Zola’s craft than his PR. But for a media celebrity –even an aspiring one– the two are often related. The persona is the PR. The answer to Zola’s public perception problem doesn’t lie in anything he can say or write, but in how he defines his public persona. Looked at another way, we PR people are often accused of crafting slick, empty words to rescue people or companies from bad situations. Sometimes that’s true. But PR at its best is helping a client to find a genuine, constructive solution to a problem and then communicating the solution. This is especially true in crisis situations, and I think it’s safe to say that Zola has had something of a little crisis. Therefore I have proposed what I think is a solution

Bonus advice for Google China:

Despite the fact that Zola’s Google stunt went wrong, Google doesn’t get a free pass from Imagethief. A basic rule of PR is that in this day and age everyone is a public representative of your company. This is doubly true of a company like Google that is famous, controversial, and the subject of much discussion in China. That secretary was sitting in a Google lobby and wearing a Google T-shirt. How is it that she (and for that matter the security guard) wasn’t briefed on what to do when a journalist came to the front desk? And in the era of blogging and the Internet, anyone waving a camera around in the lobby, even if they are raising a customer service complaint, needs to be treated like a journalist. Especially by the world’s biggest Internet company, which happens to own a huge blogging engine and world’s biggest video-sharing website. Connect the dots, people.

In fact, a good policy might be to assume anyone who comes into the lobby is a journalist until conclusively proven otherwise.

So give the poor girl at the front desk some clear guidance on what to do in that situation, and a simple escalation path she can follow when she is dealing with someone with a camera. That doesn’t mean escalating to security or the police, unless the story you want going public is “How I was roughed up by Google”. Have someone on call who is media trained, savvy and knows enough about customer service to answer questions on the record. Who knows? You might find that these kinds of situations can be turned into PR opportunities.

Hey, nice shirt!

I read the written testimony submitted by the four companies, although I’ve not read a full transcript of the Q&A. All the companies pretty much responded as expected. They all, without fail, talked about the transformative power of the Internet and the benefits it is bringing to China. They all tried to explain how they’ve weighed the implications of being in China.

They also all addressed the specifics of their individual cases. Cisco explained that it sells the exact same equipment to China that it sells to anyone else, without special modification, and that the technology that enables content filtering is the same that enables network security. Yahoo addressed the Shi Tao case, and the fact that operational control of Yahoo China lies essentially entirely with Jack Ma’s Alibaba.com (a risk that may haunt them in future, since it may place the brand at risk). Microsoft discussed the Michael Anti case. And Google, of course, discussed the considerations that went into the recent launch of their self-censored google.cn site, as well as the ongoing drop in their market share that they feel is rooted in filtering-based performance issues.

It was thoughtful, rational and articulate. It was full of motherhood statements about the Internet company values. It was, in short, exactly what you’d expect from three general counsels (Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco) and a vice president of global communications (Google).

For instance, here is Microsoft Associate General Counsel, Jack Krumholtz:

Will the citizens of that country be better off without access to our services, or will their absence just vindicate those who see our presence in the country as threatening to their official or commercial interests?

And Yahoo General Counsel, Michael Callahan:

First, our principles. Since our founding in 1995, Yahoo! has been guided by beliefs deeply held by our founders and sustained by our employees. We believe the Internet can positively transform lives, societies, and economies.

These were all the messages that needed to be delivered. But I see two problems. First, as expected, they lost the war of imagery and emotion. Out of necessity, the companies needed to be defensive and rational. Unlike their interrogators, who are playing to voters only, they are playing to three separate constituencies: the general public who are their customers and advertisers; the shareholders to whom they have fiduciary obligations; and the Chinese government, who was no doubt watching very carefully. Addressing all three of those audiences requires a measured and diplomatic approach. But in the war for general public opinion, they are then left contending with statements like this from Representative Chris Smith:

Through an approach that monitors, filters, and blocks content with the use of technology and human monitors, the Chinese people have little access to uncensored information about any political or human rights topic, unless of course, Big Brother wants them to see it. Google.cn, China’s search engine, is guaranteed to take you to the virtual land of deceit, disinformation and the big lie.

But the worst came in an act of confrontational demagoguery from Congressman Tom Lantos, a man who represents Imagethief’s home constituency in the San Francisco Bay Area, who carries the unimpeachable aura of a Holocaust survivor (a fact cited in most articles I read about his participation in the subcommittee) and who has long taken a dim view of China’s government (opposed WTO entry, opposed awarding the Olympics, etc.).  Lantos notoriously called all four company representatives on the carpet, asking each in turn if he was ashamed of the actions of his company. From a longer transcript on CNET:

Rep. Tom Lantos: Can you say in English that you’re ashamed of what your company and what the other companies have done?

Google: Congressman, I actually can’t, I don’t think it’s fair for us to say that we’re ashamed.

Lantos: You have nothing to be ashamed of?

Google: I am not ashamed of it, and I am not proud of it…We have taken a path, we have begun on a path, we have done a path that…will ultimately benefit all the users in China. If we determined, congressman, as a result of changing circumstances or as a result of the implementation of the Google.cn program that we are not achieving those results then we will assess our performance, our ability to achieve those goals, and whether to remain in the market.

Yow. Trapped. A seven word question that will stick in everyone’s head, and an eighty-three word response that no one will remember, but precious few better options considering those three different constituencies. Maybe I’m getting conservative in my middle-age (I’m a longtime liberal Democrat), or maybe the CCP is spiking my drinking water, but I didn’t think much of Mr. Lantos’ approach. Here is another statement, from the press release Lantos issued the day before the hearings:

“The hugely successful businesses that come before Congress tomorrow will have to account for their complicity in China’s culture of repression, and to begin to make amends,” Lantos said. “Government can be expected to do only so much. It is up to these wealthy entrepreneurs to help ensure that the free flow of information from which they have profited is offered worldwide.”

Well, aside from the fact that the final statement is patently wrong, this does raise a very interesting question that cuts to the heart of my complaint about how the companies dealt with the hearings. While I don’t think the wealthy entrepreneurs have any obligation to ensure that a free flow of information is offered worldwide (that ignores political realities that extend far beyond China and in cases may simply not make business sense), I am a little mystified as to their silence.

Here is why. The technology industry suffers from an interesting syndrome. It is a time honored practice among tech companies to build founders and CEOs up as evangelical prophets of the transformative power of technology, which is promoted as revolutionary and encompassing in a way that, say, shipping, fast-moving consumer goods, cars, energy, and so on are not. No industry is more susceptible to the CEO/founder cult of personality or mystique, and no industry more flagrantly positions founders and CEOs as “visionaries” than the tech industry does. This is especially important in the Internet generation of companies, all of whom were created in the last fifteen years and are still led by founders. It is only slightly less true for Microsoft.

The cult of the youthful billionaire genius touches three of the four companies involved in these hearings. Bill Gates of Microsoft may be the pre-eminent technologist of the age. Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo are famous and highly visible, as is CEO Terry Semel, a Hollywood veteran who knows a thing or two about showmanship. And Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are in a league all their own. Cisco may suffer from less of this syndrome because, although it is young and CEO John Chambers is well known, it is not first and foremost a consumer oriented firm as the other three are.

Where were all these Internet visionaries as this storm broke?

This is an important question because, Cisco aside, these firms are all, for better or for worse, closely associated with the personal values of their highly visible founders. Those values are part of what defines their public images and brands. This is especially true of Google, where the relationship between the founders’ values and the company’s values are formalized in the “Don’t Be Evil” mantra that has become such a millstone during the controversy. On page 211 of David Vise’s book, The Google Story (as unanalytical a bit of hagiography as you will find), it is recalled that:

Stanford Professor Terry Winograd says that Segey [Brin] has lead the way on three Ps: Policy, Politics and People. (When once asked what the motto Don’t Be Evil meant, CEO Eric Schmidt famously replied that evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.)

And on page 257 it says.

[Google's] very motto, Don’t Be Evil, was a thinly veiled way of letting the technologists of the world know that Larry and Sergey were not just the Google Guys, but the Good Guys, who did the right thing for users and employees and had fun too.

That’s channeling founders’ values through the company, and using them to build the brand. Michael Callahan of Yahoo does the same thing in his testimony, quoted above. And it makes the silence of all these technology luminaries in the breach seem odd and  somehow discordant.

One of the most common requests that crosses Imagethief’s desk is for communication plans to help technology executives position themselves as “thought leaders”. Unfortunately, “thought leadership” is an often abused concept in PR, with salesmanship, cheerleading and banality often masquerading in its place. The most interesting proposals are often rejected as too risky. Certainly thought leadership is easier when times are good. But it’s important when controversy arises, such as now. On the table is one of the most important issues of our time: what is the relationship between a commercial Internet and the right to freedom of speech, and should the American companies who are driving the evolution of the Internet be considered international custodians of that right?

Leadership is about risk (something that these entrepreneurs all know). Thought leadership is about intellectual risk. If it is unlikely to be argued with or shouted down, it’s probably not thought leadership. This was an opportunity for thought leadership if ever there was one. But there was little thought leadership to be had. That is a shame, because I am sure that all of these phenomenally bright and opinionated technologists are thinking deeply about this issue and debating it inside their companies.

But maybe there was no other choice. As I noted above, the companies are burdened with three different audiences, each of which has a substantially different interest in this situation. Consumers and advertisers want to feel good about the brands of the companies they patronize. Shareholders want growth. China wants foreign firms to toe the line and avoid controversy. Employees may even constitute a fourth important group in this kind of situation. That puts the companies in a supremely delicate position, where every public communication has to be considered from multiple angles if a disaster is to be averted.

But if you build your brand on the company founders’ values and leadership, and they then remain silent when those values are being questioned and leadership is most necessary, then your brand is at risk. And, in the meantime, people with fewer stakeholders to please will hammer at you from all sides.

For the record, Imagethief thinks that Google is doing the right thing, and taking a reasonable approach to the conundrum of operating in China. I have to confess some disagreement with RSF’s take-no-prisoners approach to complicity with the Chinese government censorship regime, despite my respect for them as an organization. I believe that American Internet firms should remain in China, but should take as many reasonable steps as they can to avoid putting themselves in untenable situations, such as turning over e-mail communications belonging to Chinese dissidents or journalists. As I wrote previously [note: this link now dead - WM], I think there are shades of grey in this situation, where the benefit of offering Chinese people more choice can be balanced against compliance with some of the Chinese government’s less onerous restrictions. Filtering keywords is bad, but it is not in same league as becoming an unwitting tool in the imprisoning of dissidents.

As reported yesterday, Google’s approach is to post notifications that some content has been removed when search returns are filtered. It will also refrain from offering its “Blogger” blogging service and Gmail service in China, so as to avoid placing itself in a situation similar to Yahoo’s recently, when it was required by the Chinese authorities to turn over journalist Shi Tao’s e-mails. Those are reasonable steps, and, as someone who has been party to a few boardroom discussions (PR people get to be flies on lots of walls), I am willing to believe that there was substantial debate within Google as to the merits of proceeding down this path before they made a final decision.

That being said, for any company with interests in China there will be no perfect defense. Once Google has an established business in China that they have a stake in protecting, the Chinese government will gain a degree of leverage over them regardless of whether google.com.cn in separately incorporated or where the mail or blog servers live. If the authorities wish to receive information on a Gmail user, they’ll still effectively be able to hold Google’s Chinese business hostage. What would be an interesting –and traumatic– test for Google would be how they would react in such a situation, where they have no obvious legal obligation (as Yahoo apparently did), but a clear interest in protecting their China business. That is a situation carrying substantial PR risk because the widely-used “legal obligation” PR shield, thin as it is, would no longer be available as a defense.

As to why I support US Internet firms being in China, it’s a matter of providing choice for Chinese users, even if that choice isn’t as rich as what users in other countries would get. This is essentially what Google has offered up as an explanation, and I accept it. We need to be clear with ourselves what group we’re trying to serve by pressuring US (and European) Internet firms to withdraw from China. It certainly isn’t average Chinese users. Perhaps I see this issue through too much of a personal filter. (Perhaps all of us bloggers working and living in China do; we seem to have similar opinions on this issue.) I work with seventy Chinese colleagues, almost all of whom use Google to run searches as part of their work and 100% of whom use MSN messenger to chat with friends, colleagues etc. (Don’t ask me why; that’s what they like. I’m an AIM user myself.) I certainly wouldn’t want to be the person wandering around the office explaining that the MSN Messenger servers were no longer accessible to them because Americans felt it was inappropriate for Microsoft to offer it as a service to them as long as it meant following Chinese content restrictions. And I certainly don’t see how restricting them to Chinese Internet services only serves their interests, even though it may salve our national conscience.

But, as I also wrote previously, US Internet firms need to be clear on where they draw the compliance line, without having to wait to be pressured into it or forced into it by a crisis. There does come a point at which the tradeoff is no longer worthwhile. Personally, I think it’s worth making concessions to content filtering to offer wider –if crippled– choice. But is it worth being complicit in the detention of journalists and dissidents? Answering at a personal level again, no. Google’s decision not to offer certain services in China is recognition of this division, even if it is imperfect and a bit risky. Other companies need to be clear where the line is for them, and explain it to their stakeholders at home. Otherwise we won’t have seen the last of this issue.

Finally, some will be tempted to say, “they’re just doing it for the money!” Yes. That’s what listed, joint-stock corporations do, and what they should do, pursuant to sensible regulation. I’m not aware of there being any mystery or hidden agenda about that. From a business point of view it’s totally understandable that companies should want to pursue the China market. The fact that many do is directly responsible for Imagethief having a job right now (just so you are clear on my personal interest in this issue). But, at the same time, companies need to be consider what costs and risks beyond the obvious financial ones they are willing to endure to pursue the market here. And exactly what compromises they are prepared to make.

Disclosure: Imagethief does not represent any company currently affected by Chinese Internet censorship issues. But he is damn happy Google is available in China. He is also awaiting the inevitable flames for taking the position stated above, and is aware that some bloggers he likes and respects feel otherwise.

As always, personally I think censorship is abhorrent. But I lay it at the feet of the Chinese government, not Google, and I’d still rather have Google here than not.

Other (blog) reading (various points of view):
Peking Duck 1: His original post on this issue. Conflicted.
Peking Duck 2: On Google fighting a US government subpoena. A double standard?
Roger Simon (Via the Duck): Boycott Google.
Rebecca MacKinnon: “Don’t be too evil.”
Danwei: Keep cool…still.
Fons: Yi koutou! Er koutou! San koutou!
Life After Jiangxi: Agonizing…

Added Jan 27th:
Asiapundit: Dumb move by smart guys.
Billsdue: Ka-CHING…Not.

After hearing reports that American tech giants like Microsoft and Yahoo are abiding by Chinese law mandating Internet censorship, some irritated U.S. politicians are threatening to pass laws restricting such cooperation.

Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said Thursday that the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Human Rights, which he heads, will hold a hearing in early to mid- February. Smith has invited representatives from the U.S. State Department, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Google, and the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders to speak.

The effort is designed to determine what can be done, either by legislative mandate or on a voluntary basis, to “dissociate a company from working hand-in-glove with a dictatorship,” Smith said in a telephone interview with CNET News.com.

A similar hearing is planned for Feb. 1 in the Congressional Human Rights Caucus said Ryan Keating, communications director for Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat leading the parallel effort. The caucus, unlike the human rights subcommittee, is an “informal” committee that is overseen by about 30 House members and includes a few hundred others, Smith among them, as supporting members.

Both Ryan and Smith are in the process of concocting new laws, which will likely take cues from recommendations issued by Reporters Without Borders and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a 12-member, congressionally-selected governmental panel.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders this week backed a law banning an American company from hosting an e-mail server in any “repressive” country. It’s also suggested that American corporations come up with a joint plan for how to handle censorship requests from foreign governments, including refusal to censor terms like “democracy” and “human rights.”

The companies have defended their decisions by saying that, as multinational corporations, they had no choice but to comply with Chinese mandates.

The highlight in the above quote is added by me because I think that’s the money paragraph. This is attempt to pressure Internet companies into dissociating themselves with China’s regime, and its policies. In fact, that statement is broad enough to encompass any kind of company that does business with the Chinese government, which is to say almost any foreign company in China. The article is substantial, and worth a read.

I am going to put on my PR black hat, distance myself emotionally from this situation, and look at it from a professional point of view. From where I observe, this issue is gaining momentum, and will become increasingly important for US Internet firms doing business in China. If they handle it poorly they will either find themselves legislated out of the country or, more likely, on receiving end of a growing tide of public opprobrium. Either could cause business problems and damage brand and shareholder vale.

Back in September, when the Yahoo/Shi Tao affair was emerging, I wrote the following:

[I] wonder if it will start impacting technology firms internationally. I think back to noisy, well-organized public campaigns against companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa, or in Myanmar. So far, the calls against tech firms complicit in censorship (and now arrests) in China have been pretty scattered, and confined primarily to the digerati rather than to the great mass of customers. That might change.

So far, most of the firms confronted have given variations on the “we comply with the laws of our host country” explanation. This is accurate and understandable, but as a PR holding statement it doesn’t do much to diffuse the perception that western tech firms are knuckling under to a repressive government in search of massive bucks. Just the thing to put college students in a righteous snit. Yahoo! hasn’t issued a statement on this situation that I can find, which is also not a great idea because NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders are busy filling the silence.

I can see the dilemma for big, listed Internet companies. Their shareholders will punish them ruthlessly if they aren’t aggressively pursuing the Chinese market. But to do business in China, they have to submit to the Chinese government, in all it’s capriciousness. These are really media companies – the only foreign media companies allowed to do business here – with real influence over Chinese people and a commensurate level of scrutiny from the authorities. But none of them will dare forsake the market on principles, and that leaves them vulnerable to [PR problems].

In retrospect, I should have said, “put college students and congressmen in a righteous snit”. The comparison with Apartheid-era regulations and public pressure is what has stuck in my mind since this issue started boiling, and I see more and more of that in the growing outcry. The spread of awareness of this situation beyond the digerati and into congressional human-rights committees will drive it further into the mainstream agenda, following already widespread mainstream coverage of the recent MSN/Anti affair. RSF is a well organized and media-savvy pressure group (as one would expect), and will certainly do its utmost to ensure that remains the case. (It’s also worth reading MacKinnon’s critique of RSF’s current, problematic petition on this issue. RSF’s site is, ahem, blocked in China, but the text of their proposal is also on Declan McCullagh’s blog.)

Just over a week ago, I wrote a post analyzing Microsoft’s motivations for keeping the Chinese government on-side. Its situation is not unique, and most American Internet companies are negotiating a similarly complex web of issues in a staggeringly complex regulatory and governmental environment. In that post, I reiterated that I would like to see US Internet companies taking a much more open approach to communicating around how and why they do business in China, and what policies they follow and will enforce. In response to that, a good friend of mine who works at Cisco (and who’s name will soon appear again in a forthcoming post on crappy automobiles) wrote a rational and thoughtful comment on why most companies, ever conscious of their legal exposure and share price, would be horrified at such an approach. It’s worth reading [note: the comment originally linked to here is no longer online -WM].

But I think the CNET article above illustrates the countervailing risks of following a strategy of opacity. When you leave space, forces opposed to your interests will likely fill it. And the more this issue penetrates into the mainstream, the more of those forces there will be. I think it’s unlikely –at least in the near future– that the US government will legislate in a way that prevents US Internet companies from doing business in China. Regardless of the outcome of congressional testimony, too many dollars are at stake, and the lobbyists will already be sharpening their policy papers and booking tables at lavish restaurants. But it is possible that legislation could be passed, and that would significantly damage or destroy the China business prospects for US Internet companies by making a huge, potential audience either inaccessible, or far less accessible (since the Chinese will simply block access to the US versions of services they don’t care for). Even if legislation is not passed, consumer pressure, in the form of boycotts or other activism, could damage the reputation and sales of US Internet companies. Third party nations more easily swayed by NGO arguments might apply their own sanctions against US Internet firms, especially if goaded by domestic competition. None of this might come to pass, but these are the risks that should be considered.

Three things give this situation legs it might not otherwise have. First, while many US companies do business in many dodgy regimes, none of those regimes is positioned as a major strategic rival to the US. Anti-China sentiment runs high these days. If you need to be refreshed on that, review some articles about CNOOC’s attempted takeover of Unocal last year, the valuation of the yuan or Pentagon appraisals of Chinese military capabilities. As a result, China is visible in the US in a way that very few foreign countries are. Second, running a polluting refinery or setting up sweatshops in third world countries, to pick just a couple of examples, are reprehensible. However neither cuts against the grain of a fundamental American value. If you ask random Americans on the street to name a freedom guaranteed by the US Constitution, chances are that “freedom of speech” will be at or near the to of list. Freedom of speech is a pillar of American national self-image, and when American companies are seen to be betraying that pillar you move into very charged and dangerous territory. Combine that with all the baggage around China and you can see where the risk comes from. (This is not, of course, solely an American issue, as VOiP operator Skype is now discovering.)

I have mixed feelings about this situation. I have used the Internet since 1993 and run my own website or blog for much of that time. My master’s thesis (in a broadcasting program) was written about the Internet in 1995, with a focus on its mass media potential and censorship and popular media issues. I spent several years working as an Internet and e-commerce consultant before moving into technology PR. I am attracted to the Internet for its media aspects far more than its ability to, say, improve supply chains or procurement. I believe that the strongest societies encourage free and open exchanges of ideas. I’m a blogger. Therefore I tend to react with visceral loathing to censorship and media controls. Hence my description of the deleting of Michael Anti’s blog in a previous post as “abhorrent”. In general, I still stand by that assessment.

Stepping back from that, however, and divorcing my natural inclination to project my Yanqui values onto China from my analysis, I come to the following conclusions:

1) American Internet firms should not quit or be drummed out of China
That is pointless for everyone involved. At worst, American Internet firms here operate subject to the same requirements as Chinese ones. At best, they offer a valuable alternative that still functions as a gateway to a wider world, even if parts of it are missing. Drive American Internet firms out and everyone goes to Baidu and Bokee, or their brethren, and you slam the door on the one area of Chinese media that is open to foreigners to any degree at this point. I am not sure how that helps to carry the standard of liberty to Chinese Internet users (assuming this is neccessary – see below), although it does deny business opportunities to American companies. Furthermore, every foreign company that operates in China is somehow in hock to the regime, if even indirectly. Are you prepared to tell Boeing, GM, IBM, Intel, GE and all the other pillars of American industry to get out of China as well? All of these companies engage the Chinese government, seek its custom and pay taxes in China. Were I one of these firms, I would be extremely worried about the precedent that pressure on US Internet companies might set.

China isn’t Myanmar, North Korea, 1980s South Africa or some other politically inconvenient backwater that can be isolated and forgotten about. It is an emerging great power and an immense US trading partner increasingly bound with America’s economy on a number of fronts. The implications of isolating it, were that even possible, run beyond inconveniencing a few American corporations and extend deep into the realms of foreign policy, economics and Asian security.

2) There are shades of gray in this situation
We see the Internet companies as different because we see freedom of speech as different — as a universal human right. But, as an intellectual exercise, let me pose the following: even in the US has limitations on freedom of speech. No libel; no obscenity; no yelling fire in a crowded theater. All of these limitations are predicated on mitigating harm (libel, false advertising) or respecting established social boundaries (obscenity). One might, then, concede that different countries and societies might set the boundaries of permissible free speech in different places based on those same criteria. Now, if you are China, and obsessed with maintaining social harmony in a fractious country of 1.3 billion, the vast majority of whom are shockingly poor, you might interpret the role of free speech in society somewhat different than developed, Western countries. Now, this doesn’t excuse locking up journalists or arbitrary censorship of politically inconvenient opinions. And it certainly doesn’t excuse cloaking regime-preservation in the trappings of respect for social boundaries. But it does serve as a warning to beware of letting ethnocentric value-creep color your arguments. China is not the US or Western Europe and it never will be.

There are also shades of gray in the prosecution of restrictions on speech. Removing blogs and filtering websites and keywords is a shame, but I will entertain a defense of it (note that this is different than agreeing with it) in the interest of keeping your business in China. Thought it might be antithetical to our values, it’s hard, without verging into philosophy, to argue that anyone is being directly harmed. However, supporting arbitrary prosecutions and application of the notoriously malleable “state secrets” law and jailing of inconvenient journalists and activists for long periods is hard to defend. Where, then, is the line of complicity that American Internet firms should not cross? When is it OK to surrender information to the authorities? Dare an American firm question when a Chinese prosecution is justified and when it is not? Probably not. As ESWN has pointed out in a post worth reading, if a foreign company operating in China is served with a legal warrant by the authorities, it probably has no choice but to comply. The PR risk in this situation –beyond the obvious– is that companies desperate to protect their interests in China may take a liberal interpretation of what represents due process in China. An informal “request” from the Chinese government may not have legal force, but in a country where government patronage is crucial to many businesses, that may not matter. The Gods of PR (dark and terrible gods that they are) help any American company found to have been surrendering information on Chinese users via extra-legal processes. That’s why it is important to articulate under what circumstances records will be turned over.

3) The debate will be framed in an oversimplified view of China
Those who argue that US Internet firms should either get out of China or reject government demands to filter content (which equals getting out of China) will likely frame the debate in very stark terms rooted in fiery rhetoric about the evils of the CCP, China’s sinister national ambitions and the need to protect universal values (a malleable concept) and to pressure China to improve its human rights. Many of the people making those arguments won’t know much about China, or will ignore nuanced reality in the pursuit of powerful headlines that can advance agendas. (Example: here are the digerati of Boing Boing with a satirical image that aptly demonstrates how even US cultural sophisticates view China.)

China’s government is pretty awful in a lot of obvious ways, but it is not some cackling, cartoon vulture perched atop the nation. It is not a caricature dictatorship or a Kim Jong-il-style one-man fiefdom (at least, not anymore). For all its problems, the government here has genuine ambitions for improving the country. But it governs 1.3 billion people –that’s four USAs–, two thirds of whom are desperately poor and many of whom speak different dialects, and who are beset by a range of tensions and deeply structural problems. Furthermore, the Chinese government cannot rapidly escape the legacy of its origins. It is factional and divided and there is often a pronounced lack of common cause between the central government and provincial and local governments. Progress will not be smooth or even.

But there is progress. Consider where this country was thirty years ago, when it was just emerging from the Cultural Revolution. In the space of one generation it has gone from complete isolation and destitution to a fair state of development and engagement with the world. The target audiences that US Internet firms are trying to reach are the children of people who lived through Cultural Revolution as youths. To make this example more accessible to Americans, basketball player Yao Ming’s mother was a Red Guard. Think about the progress this represents. Where once there was uniform poverty there is now growing prosperity. Where once there was isolation there are deepening international connections. Where once there was only state controlled  propaganda there is now a lively and growing commercial media, and a fair amount of access to international media. This doesn’t excuse the bad things that the government does, but it highlights that we are not talking about a Myanmar-style irredeemable military dictatorship or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy busy reducing its people to ever greater penury.

4) Chinese Internet users may not need or want to be rescued by us
When MSN killed off Michael Anti’s blog he didn’t need help from an NGO to move to Blog City (blocked in China, I note with some irony). Chinese people aren’t idiots or naifs wandering in the wilderness, waiting to be lead to civilization by foreigners. Certainly in my office they discuss government control and management of information matter-of-factly (of course, they are all also media experts).

We westerners seem to be conflicted in how we feel about China. We have an idealistic conviction that the simple flow of our ideas and culture and the relentless march of technology will somehow precipitate change, yet we can’t resist an interventionist desire to actively impose our values. At the same time we mythologize China into something unknowable and impenetrable. The result is that no matter what we do we risk patronizing the Chinese Internet users we want to help, and driving them further away.

Imposing foreign activism on China has a pretty dismal record of failure. In a country where nationalist sentiment runs high and is easily provoked, it is liable to backfire. Imagine for a moment that American Internet firms are drummed out of China by legislation or activism. My guess is that Chinese youth would not swell with admiration for courageous, highly-principled foreign companies. Rather, they would likely seethe with nationalist contempt for companies that don’t “get” China and for foreign governments that are trying to dictate what is good for China. That won’t do wonders for dialogue. I can tell you who would be happy though: Bokee (who launched a devastatingly self-interested attack on MSN prior to Anti’s removal, as reported here by ESWN) and other Chinese blogging engines who would be pleased to see off foreign competition.

Not that they need to at the moment. Most Western Internet companies in China are not doing very well. In the grand scheme of forces affecting China, the inclination of American (as opposed to Chinese) Internet companies to toe the censorship line is so far down the list as to be nearly beneath concern. The free operation of China’s domestic mainstream media ranks substantially higher. Although the two issues are tangentially connected via the Shi Tao case, US Internet companies and American interventionism are probably not the key to freeing Chinese media. (Howard French’s recent International Herald Tribune opinion piece on China’s information control efforts is worth reading.)

What does all this mean for communication?
I have said many times that the “just obeying local laws” excuse, widely used by American Internet firms when they explain their compliance with Chinese censorship requirements, is inadequate. It is inadequate because it ignores the visceral reaction that their American stakeholders have to issues of censorship and free speech and the emotionally and politically-charged complexities of all issues China, especially in the United States.  American Internet companies need to start communicating better now how they see this situation, why they feel it is justified to do business in China, why they will conform to local regulations, why this is not selling out American values, and under what circumstances they will reveal customer information or communications to governments. They need to do it before they are on the defensive in congressional hearings, when everything they say will be greeted with skepticism reserved for the proclamations of those already convicted in the press.

While they are communicating, US Internet companies need to be mindful that their audiences include the US government, their US customers, the Chinese government and Chinese customers and that public messages must be considered in that context. US Internet companies need to be prepared to act as rational advocates for China, aware of its problems while resisting attempts to demonize the country or oversimplify its situation. They need to understand China well enough to be able to explain its complexities to foreigners who might otherwise take a simplistic, emotionally charged view. They must be able to provide context for their decisions without condescending to their Chinese customers or to western stakeholders who have legitimate concerns about what their national business champions get up to abroad.

Most important, they need to remember that this is a situation driven by social values, and values have to figure in the communication, if even in explaining why they have to be applied differently in different times and places. The terse “obeying local regulations” reply is insufficient because it leaves the values part of the equation unaddressed. As long as that “values” hole in the communication is not filled by Internet companies, others, such as RSF or anti-China agitators in the US, will start filling it themselves.

This approach won’t stave off confrontation or debate about this issue, and nor should it. Part of believing in free speech is believing in the value of the debate. But it will put Internet companies in a better position to answer the accusations that will inevitably be flung their way as the rhetoric grows hotter.

Update: At the risk of creating a circular link, it’s worth reading Roland’s post on this issue at ESWN. His capsule intro: “If the subject is about Chinese Internet censorship, then this had better not be a decision made by the US Congress, Reporters Without Borders, Cisco, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  It would seem that you better ask the Chinese Internet users themselves.  I assert that they couldn’t care less about Yahoo but the loss of MSN Spaces would be a blow.”  Go check it out.

Also, Danwei’s metaphorical take.

Also, for balance, Daai Tou Laam Diary’s different take on this issue, including his deconstruction of my own arguments. Apparently I’ve made it to “arrogant China hand”, thus fulfilling one of my childhood ambitions. Not bad for only a year-and-half in China. Also in trackbacks, below.

Disclosure: Imagethief is a strong believer in freedom of speech and feels that censorship generally does far more harm than good in a society. I believe that China would benefit greatly from a more open and unfettered discourse, that the arbitrary jailing of journalists and activists is appalling and that universal human rights carry the label “universal” with some justification. My point behind writing this is not to disavow my own strong affinity for free speech or my anxieties about the complicity of American firms in practices I personally finds reprehensible, nor is it to be an apologist for the brutalities Chinese regime or for censorship. My point is to explain why I feel this is a much more complex and nuanced issue than it is generally made out to be and, thus, to illuminate some of the communication challenges and explain why current communication efforts are inadequate.

Imagethief does not represent any companies currently caught up in this issue. He does, however, represent other companies that do business with the Chinese government.