The next move seems to me to be in China’s court. If they end up restricting Google’s other business interests (R&D and sales) in China, then that, no doubt, will send a message that will reverberate globally. If China doesn’t end up booting Google in toto, I think we, the general public, will continue to remain in the dark as to the true nature of the evidence that Google has supposedly amassed implicating China in the originating cyber attacks, and which has forced them to take the action they’ve taken today. What all was hacked and stolen? How badly was Google damaged by the break-in? Will Google look foolish if the details come out? If Google goes public with the details will that put their other China interests in jeopardy? Is Google acting Googley or is it just a purely business decision?

Not too long ago we discovered that Google and China were barely even talking, other than a few words passed in Copenhagen (where China was being ultra-selective about who they would talk with) during the climate summit and perhaps a short meeting or two several links below the meaty top of the food chain. Though there are still lots of questions hanging in the air, don’t hold your breath waiting for any answers. It’s been more than two months since the highly public and publicized initial outrage and threat. I imagine it will be a lot longer before we learn much more.

Google’s not going to show their cards as long as there’s money still on the table. And I’d say that it’s a safe bet that China never will. I’d still advise everyone to restrain themselves from placing the White Hat on any Google heads. They got this whole thing rolling and then went substantively silent. There is more than an outside chance that Google got out ahead of themselves, and that their actions this morning were actually reactions, or, possibly, damage control to attempt to put the shine back on a tarnished image (let’s not forget Buzz), though this may not be the best way to do it. They haven’t done themselves any favors among their Chinese advocates and users. But then, maybe it was never really about them anyway. One guess, at this point, is  as good as another. With all the freedoms being thrown around – anti-censorship – Google owes it to everyone to let their tongues be a bit freer than they’ve been over the past two months. But then again, it may not really be about freedoms either. All we can do is keep guessing.

On Thursday, January 28, 2010 on The Official Google Blog, the un-evil ones published Google’s Privacy Principles in support of International Data Privacy Day. Less than two weeks later Google launched Buzz, a unilateral action that flipped privacy advocates on their heads. Perhaps GOOG should have spent more time studying their privacy principles rather than just publishing them as a good faith “Praise God!” ejaculation of privacy support. Below is the bullet-pointed list, though for a more thorough explication of each point, follow this link.

• Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
• Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
• Make the collection of personal information transparent.
• Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
• Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

It all sounds well and good, very high-minded, and it may have even floated a bit longer if the GOOGs hadn’t punched a hole in their own keel with Buzz. Then to make matters even worse, a few days ago Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt proclaimed that “nobody was harmed” by the dropping of the Buzz bomb, despite a litany of mea culpas issued by others from the Mountain View bunker. Growing pains? Empire building contradictions? Wishful thinking? Oedipal blindness? Maybe a bit of them all. Who can really say at this point. But I thought that it was worth posting the privacy principles, which were subsequently scuttled by Buzz. Though many long-term Google watchers have been issuing cautions for years, I think the ranks of the Google faithful have gotten a little thinner over the last week for some very good reasons. I, for one, have geared down by scaling back my Google account profile and installing the Firefox add-on Google Sharing. Paranoid? Nah. Just a juke.

What better message could the USA send to the world than to have the three standard bearers of 21st century American innovation, creativity and opportunity–Google, Facebook and Twitter–as prime sponsors of America’s presence in Shanghai?

In this age of the much-ballyhooed decline of ‘America’ – a claim, by the way, that I am not ready to concede, despite the obvious uplift and glee this brings to so many throughout the world – what better way to establish the benchmark for an American Brand than to highlight how these three companies are making us rethink how we live in this world, and who now top the growing list of international sites that are being officially blocked by the Chinese government.

As Made in China continues to take it on the chin, the most recent dangerous product warning prompted this “Important Notice” from the U.S. Citizen Service office at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing  three days ago (January 15, 2010): Warden Message Regarding Cadmium in Children’s Jewelry.

Since 2004, the CPSC [Consumer Product Safety Commission] has conducted recalls of more than 180 million pieces of metal jewelry because they contained a hazardous amount of lead.  Recent reports indicate that producers of children’s jewelry in China are using potentially dangerous levels of the heavy metal cadmium, a known carcinogen, as a substitute.  In response to these reports, Chairman Tenenbaum states that the CPSC has opened a formal investigation into the dangers of children’s metal jewelry manufactured in China.

The CPSC warns that swallowing, sucking on or chewing a metal charm or necklace could result in exposure to lead, cadmium or other heavy metals, which are known to be toxic at certain levels of exposure. CPSC further warns caregivers to protect young children from possibly being exposed to lead, cadmium or any other hazardous heavy metal by removing any items that may contain the offending metals.

Despite the long and seemingly unending line of product safety disasters (dog food, milk, drywall and now toxic children’s jewelry, to name just a few – which FYI have also been problems for Chinese consumers) there is a steady drumbeat of support accompanied by frenetic cheerleading by seemingly intelligent people  – who I would think should know better – who have already conceded the next 90 years (or, at the very least, the next 40) of the century to the Chinese economic juggernaut. For the moment I will avoid laying out why I see it much differently, as many people who have been here for a long time do. But I cannot help but suggest you do a Google search on “china ant tribe” – the growing number of marginalized college degree holders who have been ghettoized at the fringe of many large Chinese cities as they desperately search for futures by working jobs that are mostly low-paying, if they can find jobs at all. From China’s ‘Ant Tribe’: Between Dreams and Reality:

“They are like ants: clever, weak and living in groups,” says Lian Si, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Chinese and Global Affairs of Peking University, who has studied the phenomenon. For two years, Lian led a team of more than 100 graduate students to follow the groups in university towns like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Xi’an.

In his book ‘Ant Tribe’, published in September 2009, Lian estimates the total population of the ‘ant community’ in major cities at one million across China, with about 100,000 found in Beijing alone.

Most of the ‘ant tribe’ are from poor rural families and take temporary and low-paying jobs as insurance agents, electronic product sales representatives and waiters. Some are either unemployed or underemployed.

Lian, also an associate professor at the Beijing-based University of International Business and Economics, predicts that an increasingly challenging job market will see the ant tribe growing further in number.

It is fair to say that these folks are not on the “team,” though this is only one of the groups of the growing disenfranchised who are being left behind by China’s much-touted command economy.

As much is being made of China as the next sun to blaze across the 21st C. sky, the fact is that China as a brand is taking a public relations beating, and even more now as they have come to believe the wagging pundits singing of future glories (while often, I might add, making good money in the process of doing it).

I’d propose that beyond merely sponsoring the USA Pavilion, that there should also be displays of their products, complete with live, interactive exhibits showing how they are changing the face of the world, rather than parceling it up into digital cantons. What better way for America, and a host of other democratically governed countries, to inform through example the openness of information. How would China respond to this sort of “taking it to the World Expo” with information that is blocked in China? Would China prevent their citizens from entering any country’s pavilion that was displaying and promoting content that the government officially blocks? Will it be a World Expo or an expo of a world with Chinese characteristics, a “One World, Two Systems” sham? Do Barack, Hillary and State have the stomach and knees for an information confrontation in Shanghai? It would be nice to believe that they do. It just might be the restorative act that the U.S. so desperately needs: a public stand against the new world’s information brute. It would be consistent with Obama’s “non-censorship” stand that he took in Shanghai. And, yes, I am already beating myself up for trying, after all these years, to remain somewhat optimistic. Apologies.
________

For more on Google and internet freedom see Rebecca MacKinnons’s Google, China, and the future of freedom on the global Internet

There were three moles, one of whom was the Chinese Communist Party branch secretary.  This party secretary was set up four years ago by the National Security Ministry.  This guy studied at Jiaotong University and then jointed Computer Security Department.  The department sent him to study computers at the Computer Security School in Jiaotong University.  He programmed every day. When he graduated, he joined Google.  There, he recruited two more insiders.  One of them was the insider who broke into the source code for Gmail and gave it to the Chinese government.
The government wanted this mainly to monitor the anti-Communist persons who use Gmail.
So this was sensationalistic, because of the involvement of the Chinese Communist Party branch.
This guy got a 1,000,000 yuan reward, plus public servant status.
These people used to sneak over to Lujiazui after work to attend Chinese Communist Party branch meetings.

These are some very specific accusations in this post. The source is anonymous, and it is difficult to know if this is fact or fiction. It will be interesting to see if things actually unfold as this person is claiming. If there is truth here, I can already hear the official Beijing spin: “It’s those damn rogue Shanghai bunch again. We had no idea! Really!”

(h/t to elliottng on Twitter.)
________

Update 1: January 17, 2010 (7:00 AM ,+8 UTC)

I have it from a trusted source that the ESWN piece “contains several statements that I know, first-hand and for sure, are false,” regarding internal Google details. As I mentioned above, it is difficult to know whether this piece is fact, fiction or a bit of both. The original link to the Chinese site which ESWN translated is now blank. That said, at his moment the front page of Xinhua (English) has a link to a story Inappropriate to play up Google China’s withdrawal, though the link leads to a page in Chinese that translates to “Sorry! You see that the manuscript has been deleted or expired.” This is how it often goes here.

On a personal note, this morning the password of my secondary Google email account mysteriously stopped working after never having been a problem before. When I logged in online I received a message that said “suspicious activity” had been detected, and I needed to enter a new password. Hacked? Who knows? But I think I’ll change the password to my primary account too.
________

Update 2: January 17, 2010 (7:38 AM ,+8 UTC)

My wife has just pointed me towards the following post by Xujun Eberlein at Inside-out china entitled Communist Spies at Google China? She points out that the original post in Chinese uses a specific term that “[a] mainland Chinese almost certainly would not use,” concluding that the piece looks to have been written by someone from Taiwan. Disinformation? We’ll see.

For a global corporation with the money, heft and influence of Google, their unofficial “Don’t be evil” tag has always struck me as a line lifted straight from the Deadhead Econ 101 handout. I’m pretty sure I heard someone at Red Rocks, 1983 say this, but I wouldn’t swear to it (or anything else, for that matter, from those three days). The notion of “Don’t be evil” smells of pimply-face naivete and a subjectively structured – and adolescent – moral high ground, as if each bullet-point in all Google’s meetings sets a Lear-ish Fool propped in the corner to squawking, “Don’t be evil! Don’t be evil!” while everyone nods in agreement, “Yeah, darn it, we can’t be evil.”

It is still not clear what has driven Google’s actions, vis-a-vis google.cn. The only thing that we can be clear on is that it was a very clever and redemptive public relations win, at least for the moment. There is so much more behind this story that I would caution you to be careful when you read how many are painting this picture (for a dumbed-down view see Nicholas Kristof’s opinion in the NYT. And no, I will not link to it!). I assure you that we will never know why things have gone down as they have, though I can easily imagine that someone long ago choked the Fool in the corner and mysteriously ‘disappeared’ him just as Shakespeare did in King Lear. There’s only so much truth one can bear.

I am not suggesting that Google has ‘done evil’ by their action in this matter – in fact, I am happy that the China censorship conversation has become so front and center – though their intent may end up being something entirely other. Just be careful before you crown Google with the White Hat. It is, after all, a large global corporation, not a bunch of Deadheads selling tee shirts.

The official silence is not a surprise, and who knows how long the silence will continue. While the government is quite adept at framing five-year plans, they have still not learned how to respond to the unexpected. The image I always conjure up when the government finds itself on the hot seat needing a response has everything to do with the Keystone Cops sans the humor (though it might be fun to be a fly on the wall). I imagine that no one knows what to say, or who it is supposed to say whatever it is that needs to said. This is the thin ice that, if it cracks, can swallow a career along with the futures of everyone in the requisite support cloud. To be forever known as the one who fouled the Google pitch can be the road to a future in Ningxia, or slightly worse, prison. (Read the Tang poets. They’re current.)

The only thing that’s clear at the moment is that there will one day be a response – maybe today, maybe next week, no one knows. Until there is a response you can bet that foreign press briefings at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should be real ‘monkey with a football’ affairs. I put this in the same category as the Olympic torch disaster, where the torch became China’s torch protected by a platoon of Blue Goons, as everyone completely missed the fact that what they thought the world thought of them was not what the world thought of them at all. But this time Zhang Yimou won’t be able to dazzle everyone into a choreographed state of forgetting.

What form the response will take is only a crapshoot to a point. Don’t hope for anything that might look like an ‘opening.’ That’s not how these guys work. I would not be a bit surprised if the response will take the form of a deeper and heavier blocking blanket. In the narrow world of the Party guys there is not much room to move.

The international take on Google’s actions is, as you know, all over the map. Here are a few links which I think are worth reading.

James Fallows, Atlantic: The Google news: China enters its Bush-Cheney era
Rebecca MacKinnon, Guardian: Will Google stand up to France and Italy, too?
Evgeny Morozov, Foreign Policy: Doubting the sincerity of Google’s threat
Rebecca MacKinnon, Wall Street Journal: Google Gets On the Right Side of History
Evgeny Morozov, Foreign Policy: Google + US government = Love?
Jonathan Watts, Guardian: How internet giant Google turned on gatekeepers of China’s GFW
Adam Minter, Shanghai Scrap: Google’s cowardice

There is a lot of misperception that Google is doing this solely as a statement against censorship, based on the cyber attacks last month. I’m not buying it; it’s much too simplified an explanation for a very politically complicated issue. I tend to agree with Morozov’s “very crude and cynical” read, though I am not so sure if it is either crude or cynical.

Here is my very crude and cynical (Eastern European) reading of the situation: Google was in need of some positive PR to correct its worsening image (especially in Europe, where concerns about privacy are mounting on a daily basis). Google.cn is the goat that would be sacrificed, for it will generate most positive headlines and may not result in devastating losses to Google’s business  (Google.cn holds roughly 30 percent of the Chinese market).

All the talk about cybersecurity breaches seems epiphenomenal to this plan; it may simply be the easiest way to frame Google’s decision without triggering too many “why, oh why?” questions. Besides, there is no better candy for U.S. media and politicians than the threat of an all-out cyber-Armageddon initiated by Chinese hackers. I can assure everyone that at least a half of all discussions that Google’s move would spur would be about the need to make America more secure from cyberattacks.  No better timing to throw more terrorism-related meat to the U.S. public (“what if they read Obama’s email?”).

But in the end, it all hardly matters. What’s happening is happening for whatever the initial reason may have been, and it has spun into a yarn that has a strut all it’s own. What it will eventually be is anyone’s guess, though the following piece from the WSJ tells the story as best as it can be told: Irish Bookie Lays Odds On Google Pullout From China.

________

Update before I even publish:

The first official response has come out from Reuters (h/t CDT):

In a statement posted on the State Council Information Office website, cabinet spokesman Wang Chen warned against pornography, cyber-attacks, online fraud and “rumors,” saying that government and Internet media have a responsibility to shape public opinion.

The statement said China itself was a victim of hacker attacks, and that Beijing resolutely opposed hacking.

Wang’s comments, Beijing’s first official reaction after Google threatened to quit China over cyber-attacks, gave no indication that China — which has the world’s biggest number of Internet users at 360 million — would give ground.

I always love the pornography insertion. I live within a few minutes walking distance of several brothels. There used to be one within spitting distance of the front gate of our complex, though it was closed in the lead-up to the Olympics. But I guess that’s another issue.