Yesterday was likely the worst day of Jerry Yang’s life. He attended a hearing whereby Yahoo is blamed for handing over information which helpd put political dissidents to jail. According to NYT’s article, during the hearing, Wang was asked to apologize to a weeping mother of a journalist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
I started asking myself whether I’d have done what Jerry did if I were in his shoes (I’d assume for a moment that he’s the one who made thed decision). I certainly do not want to be in the position of putting a dissident in jail. On the other hand, I can think of a hundred justifications for me to hand over the information. In fact, practically, I’m not sure whether Yahoo China really had a choice – if I were the head of Yahoo China, I’m certainly not courageous enough to go to jail for not complying with the government’s request…
The only way to avoid getting into sticky situations like this would be to avoid China altogether. If you do get into China business, be prepared that sometime in the future, you might end up between a rock and a hard place. As my Chinese friends always say, everything is “complicated”.
No, it’s incomparably easy; China is Bad, Wrong, and Blight on the face of the world. People shouldn’t do business with China except under strictest of conditions.
No production should be done in China unless it is completely overseen by Westerners; they at least can be trusted not to shit in their own homes.
No technology or commercial enterprises (banking and such) should be done with China. They cannot be trusted with such endeavors.
The above comment sounds a little harsh to me. To be honest I suspect the decision was made by local managers in Beijing in an attempt to comply with local laws (this doesn’t make it the correct thing to do by any means) — I am sure they were threatened with closure by the police. I don’t think there was any attempt to contact the US head office until afterwards.
J.
All reports point to the problem being local managers in the businesses making an attempt to maximize profits at any and all costs to the workers and consumers. Beijing doesn’t have a firm grasp on the provincial governments, much less the businesses.
The fault lies with the Chinese people in this case (poor products). Direct oversight by Westerners is the only reasonably solution. We need to both protect ourselves and ensure that we’re not implicitly condoning inhumane working condition; i.e. unsafe work environments, child labor, discriminatory employment practice, etc…
In the specific case of Yahoo, we just shouldn’t be there in first place. It is inappropriate for any Democratic nation to allow its businesses – especially search engines and suchlike – to work with China’s totalitarian regime. It’s just giving their government the means to spy upon its people and control all of their information sources.
I don’t disagree with many points mentioned above. However, there was supposed to be oversight by Westerners in the case of Mattel and other toy products. Somewhere along the way, they dropped the ball. We can’t forget that China is a developing country, and that people working in those factories are living in poverty and cannot afford the thomas tanks. So yes, they don’t care as much about product quality because they’re not the consumers, the same way we don’t care about dumping pollution in their country because we don’t live there.
AF,
China is an industrial and commercial powerhouse that possesses the full range of 21st century technologies. How are they a “developing country?” I’m afraid that’s just a piece of UN perpetrated Chinese propaganda. They hide behind that label to excuse a lot of their destructive behavior.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to judge a nation as “developing” because they have a repressive government and an extreme wage gap between the quintiles. By those lights Qatar, Iran and Saudi Arabia are Developing Countries.