Just following orders in China
IMAGINE WHAT would have happened if during the 1980s an American communications company had provided information that allowed the South African government to track down and imprison an anti-apartheid activist. That is pretty much the moral equivalent of what Yahoo has just done in China in the case of journalist Shi Tao. And the California-based Web giant deserves the same kind of public opprobrium that would have fallen on any Western firm that dared to publicly cooperate with the enforcers of apartheid.
Shi, the victim of Yahoo's shameful behavior, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for "illegally sending state secrets abroad." Shi was a reporter for a Chinese newspaper, Contemporary Business News. His crime consisted of e-mailing to a New York-based website information about a supposedly secret directive his newspaper had received from the state propaganda department telling it how to cover the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The security services were able to track him down thanks to information helpfully provided by Yahoo's Hong Kong affiliate, whose e-mail service Shi used.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang breezily defended his company's role: "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law." I wonder how far Yang would take that logic. What if local law required Yahoo to cooperate in strictly separating races? Or the rounding up and extermination of a certain race? Or the stoning of homosexuals? Would Yang eagerly do the government's bidding in those cases too?
Granted, the Chinese communist regime may not be as odious as apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany or Taliban Afghanistan. But it's bad enough. As summed up in the State Department's most recent human rights report: "The [Chinese] government's human rights record remained poor, and the government continued to commit numerous and serious abuses." These included "instances of extrajudicial killings; torture and mistreatment of prisoners, leading to numerous deaths in custody; coerced confessions; arbitrary arrest and detention, and incommunicado detention."
