Principled Profit points to an article (“Yes, Master: How Western companies are selling their souls for a piece of the massive Chinese market“) in Maclean’s that is a great primer for a discussion about business ethics in China. Following is a very interesting clip from the article:
“Today, China employs approximately 30,000 cyber-police to monitor Web traffic and postings from the country’s roughly 111 million Internet users. Writing articles ‘incompatible with the mainstream ideology’ is prohibited. Posting messages that ‘damage the reputation of the state’ can get you arrested. And publishing anything deemed to be a state secret can carry the death penalty. The list of banned websites now stands at 500,000 and growing.
“Even with the full weight of the Communist regime behind it, the censorship effort would have been futile without equipment and know-how supplied by Western vendors like Cisco Systems Inc., SunMicrosystems Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. And with the world’s three dominant Internet companies — Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft — in a blind rush for a piece of China’s spectacular wealth, Beijing has found all the willing accomplices it needs to strip the Internet of its anonymity, its freedom, and to turn it into yet another tool of repression. Google and Microsoft have recently launched Chinese versions of their Internet software that block access to topics that offend China’s ruling party, such as democracy and Tibet. Yahoo recently handed over a Chinese journalist to authorities after he posted information critical of the government on an Internet message board.”
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These companies can give all the rationalizations they can think up but the bare facts cannot be denied. They should just stop trying to make it appear that they are giving service “for the good of the people” with the argument that “some information is better than no information at all” and that the people’s exposure to what little information is allowed by the regime would eventually lead them to liberation. These companies should own up to their pure profit motivation.