SHANGHAI - European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes thinks China's
Internet censorship qualifies as a trade barrier that should be taken up by the
World Trade Organization (WTO).
Speaking at the tail-end of a five-day trip to China on May 17, Kroes linked
the matter to achieving a competitive environment for European companies and
raised the censorship issue in a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Zhang
Dejiang in Beijing.
"It is one of those issues that needs to be tackled within the WTO," she told
reporters in Shanghai. "I am pushing wherever I can just to get European
enterprises on a level playing field in China and the other way around."
She is not alone. Her remarks over the Chinese government's strict monitoring
of Internet content within the country - in which
information deemed sensitive by the ruling Communist Party is blocked - is
evidence that the European Union wants to join the United States' push on
Internet freedom and likens the issue to free trade. United States Trade
Representative Ron Kirk said in March that the administration of President
Barack Obama was weighing the merits of taking China's censorship of Google to
the WTO as an unfair barrier to trade.
In Google's case, it is now known that the US Internet search engine giant
agreed to follow Chinese rules on the screening of information when it started
its business in China. Google had been doing so until last year, at which time
it said China had blocked access to its YouTube site and Chinese hackers had
got into personal Gmail accounts. Google demanded in January that China lift
the censorship or it would pull out of the country. With the Chinese government
unmoved, Google in March rerouted its searches in mainland China to uncensored
Google Hong Kong - and pressed Washington to take the issue to the WTO.
Some Western experts cast doubt on whether the US could ever win an argument at
the WTO that mixed the censorship issue with trade rules. "The trade case may
not be an easy one to make," Warren Maruyama, the former general counsel of the
US Trade Representative's office, said in a report by Bloomberg. "Censorship
per se is not a violation of the WTO," Maruyama, a partner at Hogan &
Hartson LLP in Washington, told the news service. "You would have to show the
violation of some specific WTO rule." [1]
China's Internet censorship is applied across all Internet service providers
and Internet content providers, domestic or foreign (and in practice, the
Chinese government may punish domestic firms even harder for violations). So
the charges that censorship violates free trade and fair competition are
difficult to sustain. If European or American Internet corporations cannot
compete with local ones in China, they can hardly blame censorship.
Under the same competition conditions, foreign Internet corporations seem to be
much weaker than Chinese ones. For instance, in place of YouTube there is Tudou
or Youku, with instant access to Avatar or the latest episode of Lost.
For every Google there is a Baidu that offers Lady Gaga's new hit or the Pink
Floyd discography for download. Facebook has an alternative in Kaixin, Amazon
has Taobao, Paypal has Alipay.
Many Chinese officials and scholars say the US and EU are trying to intervene
in free trade with another non-trade factor, the free flow of information on
the Internet, which (like the human-rights issue) they want to use to bring
about changes to China's political and social system. Their suspicions seem to
be supported by the fact that the EU and the US have kept mute on Internet
censorship in other countries, such as India.
While many Chinese dislike their government's Internet censorship they also
suspect the US and the EU are motivated to fight for free trade only when trade
is in China's favor. Human rights and now Internet information freedom become
weapons to deal with trade problems with China.
In this regard, they recall a bitter page in history in the early 19th century.
When the United Kingdom could not sustain its growing deficits from the tea
trade with China (partially also because the Qing imperial court refused to
open the Chinese market for British goods), it smuggled opium into China.
When China moved to ban opium, British gunboats waged war. In the following
decades, to force the Chinese government to open China's doors for so-called
"free trade", other Western countries resorted to non-trade means, generally
force, to achieve their goals. In short, about 170 years ago, the British
started the first Opium War, and then other Western countries launched wars to
force China to open its market (with the exception of the US, which achieved
the goal by coercion).
Consequently, China quickly fell from being a wealthy power to a semi-colonized
country, and soon thereafter the economy almost totally collapsed while its
market was flooded with goods and capital from the West. According to some
historical data, in 1820, 20 years before the first Opium War, China's gross
domestic product was 32.4% of the word figure, the richest country at that
time.
For many Chinese there is some similarity between today and the past. In the
past, when the trade deficit became unbearable, the British resorted to force
to impose their unjust, imperial and colonizer's terms on China, and other
Western countries followed. Now, when the West's trade with China is not in its
favor, non-trade excuses are introduced.
Like in the past, the West still takes the approach of intervening in China's
internal political and social affairs for the sake of its own economic benefit.
A big difference, though, is that more than a century ago the West used wars to
force China to yield to its terms; now it resorts to wars without the smoke of
gunpowder.
China's censorship to filter "harmful" information online clearly is a domestic
issue and a political decision. Both domestic and foreign Internet enterprises
should comply with the rules since they are legislated laws. Even if Beijing's
censorship is not consistent with Western standards of freedom or human rights,
it has nothing to do with free and fair trade.
If Kroes or US officials take China's censorship issue to the WTO, they would
be using an economic excuse to intervene in China's politics. If Internet
censorship could be related to free trade, and the WTO deemed this was the
case, then virtually any Chinese domestic societal or political issue could be
employed by Western countries to press China on trade issues.
For the West, China's economic issues can also be translated for battles in the
political arena. For US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an Internet search
engine unfettered by censorship is a human right and a political freedom.
For Beijing to give up sovereignty over domestic political and societal affairs
would be untenable. In its view, censorship is a purely domestic matter
unrelated to economic competition, and the state of competition between
Internet corporations is an economic issue entirely separate from censorship.
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