A Stitch in Haste

A while back Microsoft got into a wee spat of trouble over its sudden withdrawal of support (which was not the same as "opposition to") a comprehensive gay rights bill up for a vote in Washington State legislature. The bill failed by one vote.

Unlike most bloggers (and especially gay bloggers), I was rather forgiving of Microsoft's goof. Whatever the exact chain of events (the media and blogger accounts of the incident were overflowing with presumptions, innuendo and wild guesses), Microsoft's error was clearly one of corporate lethargy, myopia and miscommunication, not bigotry and certainly not cowardice toward a third-rate Bible-thumper who threatened a 1,000-member boycott of the software behemoth (my guess is that Microsoft probably sells about 1,000 items per minute if not per second).

On the other hand:

Microsoft is cooperating with China's government to censor the company's newly launched Chinese-language web portal, a spokesman for the tech giant said. The policy affects blogs created through the MSN Spaces service, said Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director at MSN.
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On Monday, Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, said bloggers were not allowed to post terms to MSN Spaces such as "democracy," "human rights" and "Taiwan independence." Attempts to enter those words were said to generate a message saying the language was prohibited.
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Chinese censors scour internet bulletin boards and blogs for sensitive material, and block access to violators. Sites that let the public post comments are told to censor themselves or face penalties.

Sohn said heavy-handed government censorship is accepted as part of the regulatory landscape in China, and the world's largest software firm believes its services still can foster expression in the country. "Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here," he said.

I respectfully disagree.

Appeasement with tyranny and oppression never works; it is never a positive. It boggles the mind to see so many people accept the bizarre notion that this basic axiom — proved again and again when both applied (e.g., the Soviet Union) and ignored (e.g., Nazi Germany) — somehow doesn't apply where China is concerned.

By the way, if Microsoft has so much "market power" from its status as an "oppressive monopolist" itself, then why is it kowtowing to China so willingly? It does not appear that Microsoft (which is operating MSN China as a joint venture with the Chinese government) is making appreciable amounts of money from this particular operation, so charges of "sell-out" are probably misplaced.

Perhaps it's just Washington State all over again: corporate lethargy, myopia and miscommunication. In any case, I hope Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and the others don't think that they'll go down in history as heroes for bringing blogging to China. They're far more likely to go down as among the worst collaborators in the history of censorship.

Very sad.

Other thoughts, some in disagreement, at Psychotic Pineapples, Soul of Wit, Modulator, Roger L. Simon and Samizdata.

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On a related subject: "Yes! Yes! To Mark Steyn you listen!"

China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over — the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China — a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private.
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How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop. ... Unlike the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free — or even free-ish — society.
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The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. ... China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people — and Beijing still has no interest in that.

Read the whole thing. These are not people we should be doing business with. These are not leaders who should command our respect, and certainly not our fear. (Hat tip to Somewhere in the Middle.)