A matter of enormous significance slipped into the news a couple of weeks ago, though it was buried under the rubble in Port-au-Prince. Although in the short term it will be drowned out by the continued media fallout in Haiti, its historical reach may be a lot longer.
The media monster, Google, has announced that it may pull out of China, pending resolution of its recent decision no longer to permit the regulations and de facto censorship previously required by the current regime, a regime to which it had consented until now. This is a major about-face from the company’s previous understanding of the dynamics of globalization. In short, Google attempted to go global by respecting the local rules in any country it entered. The idea seems to be that there is no universal set of standards or guidelines regarding search engines or any other form of commerce. There is no international law governing international markets. While it sounds odd to say that, this is the clear, if only implicit, implication in Google’s previous policy.
We might examine the International Olympics as an important site for illuminating this paradox; they also help to show how religion plays a subtle and complicating role in these issues. Racism has long been deemed out of bounds in the international arena. Regimes like the South African regime under apartheid could be suspended from participation, a decision grounded in some conviction about the universality of the strictures against racism and race-based forms of segregation or exclusion.
But turn from race to gender, and things look decidedly different. When the IOC has attempted to articulate worries about gender-based segregation or exclusion from organized athletics, the claim to this standard’s universality wrecked on the shoals of—what else?—religion. Your western standards of gender identity and gender equality are not ours, was the obvious religious rejoinder. There is no international law governing international gender relations.
The current powers in China have long played on precisely these capitalist paradoxes and the moral quandaries they inspire. “You call them universal rights; we call them western impositions . . .” you get the idea.
These days, in the desperate search for new markets, corporations seem to care less whether they are truly open markets. The cooperative rule of law is detachable from the competitive rule of the global marketplace. If it takes submitting to governmental regulation, however intrusive, to get into the local market, then so be it.
But the Chinese government, positively ebullient in the confidence its enormous and thriving markets inspire, may finally have overreached. Disturbing evidence has surfaced suggesting that some one or some agency internal to this Chinese market (suspected to be some branch of the Chinese government, under the aegis of its normal regulatory powers) has attempted to hack into Google’s databases, in order to gather information on potential subversives—defined, amazingly, by their involvement in the defense of human rights.
The “cap and trade” could not be clearer or more egregious: more commerce, fewer rights. Consenting to de facto censorship has unwittingly made Google accomplice to future government crack-downs of a more punitive and political nature. Finally, at long last, Google seems prepared to cry foul.
The implications of this decision could be profound and far-reaching. And they extend well beyond the welcome revisiting of the fundamental question concerning the balance between the local and the global, the pull of economic necessity and the push toward human rights. The fact that the new electronic media are the site of this battle is the real story.
From Athens and Tehran, to Beijing and elsewhere, a younger generation that has grown up with computers, and cellphones, and all the rest are brilliantly deploying these technologies along with street protest and demands for substantive reform. Religion often plays a role in the protests, as the regime in Tehran attempts to shut down the wrong kinds of religion, and the regime in Beijing seems intent on shutting down “western” religion altogether. Both governments well understand the power and volatility of these new technologies, and have worked very hard to keep them contained. In the Chinese case, Google has now apparently decided either to pull the stopper out of the regulatory bottle, or else to pull the plug on its operations and leave the country.
Neither Google nor the Chinese want that. And for that very reason these matters will be debated for some time to come. But the fundamental terms of the debate have shifted, and that is a most promising development, for religious, and ethnic, and ethical minorities, worldwide.
