Clinton wades into Google-China row
Clinton wades into Google-China row
Thursday, 21, Jan 2010 05:05
By Alex Steger.
Hillary Clinton today fired a warning shot across China's bows by saying those who carried out the failed attack against Google last week should face "international condemnation".
Google has threatened to pull out of the Chinese market after revealing it, and the Gmail accounts of several human rights activists, had been the victim of an attempted hack.
Although the search engine giant did not explicitly blame the Chinese government for the cyber attack, it has led to an escalating war of words between Beijing and Washington over the issue of internet censorship.
In her address at the Newseum in Washington DC Mrs Clinton also suggested that restricted internet access was a breach of human rights.
Although the speech addressed a wide range of concerns about internet technology and how it can be used both for good and for evil it was Mrs Clinton's referral to the internet attacks in China that will attract the most attention.
"Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century," she said.
"The United States and China have different views on this issue. And we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently."
She also said that she expected China to investigate the attacks and that the findings of any investigation to be made transparent.
China was not the only the country to be named by Mrs Clinton for breaches of internet freedom with Tunisia, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam also being mentioned.
The address called on businesses to help fight censorship by not operating where the internet was heavily censored. This would follow the example of search engine Google who earlier this month said it was considering pulling out of China altogether after uncovering evidence of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" upon its corporate infrastructure in China.
Google's Chinese presence has always appeared untenable with its corporate motto of "Don't be evil" given the internet censorship it has had to agree to since day one of its operations there.
In the past week the Chinese government has attempted to draw a line between its bilateral relations with the US and what it has painted as a commercial dispute with California-based Google.
But national media, all effectively subject to central control in Beijing, have accused the US state department of being behind Google's well-publicised threat to quit China.
Global Times - a tabloid owned by People's Daily, the Communist party of China's mouthpiece, this week ran with the headline "The world does not welcome the White House's Google".
CNN quoted the article as saying: "Whenever the US government demands it, Google can easily become a convenient tool for promoting the US government's political will and values abroad. And actually the US government is willing to do so."
And China Youth Daily said on Tuesday that the US was promoting human rights under a guise of a commercial dispute.
"In their hearts, when Google is in trouble that means that western culture is in trouble. Using Google to propagate American-style freedom of speech. is the real reason that Google chose not to address its problems in the market but through politics," the paper said in another translation provided by CNN.
But the country's vice foreign minister He Yafei has insisted the row should not be "over-interpreted".
"The Google case should not be linked with relations between the two governments and countries; otherwise, it's an over-interpretation," he said, insisting that disputes between firms and governments over internet supervision were common.
Mrs Clinton's address today will have done little to quash the Chinese suspicions of the state department and its relationship with Google.
Last year during an official visit to China, Barack Obama appeared at a carefully stage-managed town hall event in which he criticised censorship, saying that criticism only made him a better president.