For Americans doing business in China, it is a short step between fear and collaboration, as I recently found during a two-week visit to Shanghai and Beijing, the two leading destinations in China for American “expats.”
What is unusual about these people is not that they are afraid; many people in China are. What is unusual about these people is that they are Americans doing business in China—some even doing business successfully. What they fear, of course, is the same thing that China’s people fear: the arbitrary power of government.
They all agreed that working for an American company had benefits over employment with a Chinese company. There was more openness at work, more emphasis on performance and more room to take chances. But one thing was the same: If they were caught criticizing the government, or even breaking the petty rules that govern their social lives—such as the ban on meeting in formal associations that might touch on political and social issues—the American company would not intervene to help them.
Now, Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world and its founder Bill Gates has spent billions of dollars on a foundation to reduce global inequalities in health and education. And yet his own company is so intimidated by China’s government that terms basic to free expression are banned from its search engine.
American collaboration gets even uglier than that, however. In September Internet company Yahoo admitted that its employees in China assisted the government in making a case against a dissident journalist named Shi Tao, jailed since April, apparently for revealing information about a crackdown by the Communist Party.
In response to a question about the journalist’s fate at a Beijing Internet conference in September, Jerry Yang, an American co-founder of Yahoo, confirmed that his company had helped the Chinese government arrest and prosecute Shi Tao. Yang didn’t give specifics, but Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based advocacy group, has said that Yahoo officials in China helped the government track Shi Tao down using the IP address from which he read his Yahoo e-mail account.
The largest, most well financed corporations in the world are kowtowing to their new imperial masters in China. Why? Because their former imperial leadership is in disarray and chaos, and they risk being found complicit in the ransacking of the US economy and destruction of the country. Better to align with another authoritarian regime, one without much social freedoms but lots of capitalistic promise. Afterall, they can still off source their assets and money; well at least for a while. I found it completely ludicrous that Bush suggested the other day that he was following in Reagan's footsteps: Reagan defeated communism and Bush will defeat islam. Well clearly Reagan never defeated communism, in fact he helped strengthen it beyond measure by allowing it to break off those aspects that were draining its capacity to function and empowering what remained to get stronger and more potent. Russia is still one of the mightiest military and nuclear powers in the world, now free from controlling territory to control resources, mostly its own. China is becoming the world's largest economic engine completely controlled by the Communist Party apparatus that forces "amerikan" corporations to obey. China, like Russia, is moving into space with the support and help of these corporate forces. China, India, and Russia will outcompete the US for precious energy and mineral resources, and suck the life out of the US. It is so apparent to US corporate and wealthy interests that they are already bowing to their new masters.GET IT YET!!! WE are at WAR!!!
