George Orwell in his hard-hitting satirical novel Animal Farm wrote: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." It seems history has turned a full circle and now it's the leading US companies, driven by unbridled greed for market dominance, who are bending over backwards to appease the autocratic regime in China. So, for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and Wal-Mart there is one set of rules that applies to everyother 'animal' and another set created exclusively for the 'Red animal'.
Google: Does not offer email, chat rooms, or blogs in China, but only Web search, image search, local search, and Google news and that it censors these programs so that Chinese customers cannot search for "democracy," "Falun Gong," and other topics that China wants to shield its people from.
Yahoo: Provided information about one of its Chinese customers that led to his arrest and a 10-year prison sentence for political activity.
Cisco: Sold equipment to the Chinese police that assists them in monitoring dissidents.
Microsoft: Is not allowing the Chinese version of its Web portal, MSN Spaces, to use words deemed politically sensitive by China's Communist Party.
Wal-Mart: Wal-Mart with 1.6 million employees in 16 countries and regions, has a tradition of not allowing trade unions in its outlets. The CPC-backed All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has forced the Wal-Mart to allow the establishment of labour unions in its branches.
American Leadership's hypocicy in dealing with China is legendary; and now US MNCs seem to be emulating their politicians. I don't have any objection to that, provided, the US and these companies stop preaching ethics and values to others. At the same time, China has shown the world how vulnerable these powerful MNCs are. One can make them dance to ones tunes provided they get double digit growth figures in bargain.
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2 comments:
Dear Gaurav,
You observation about the 'Hypocrisy' is valid to a large extent and it did a lot of damage to these large corporations trying to maintain a balance between their ethical standards and getting their share of the "Red Dragon' pie. However, I disagree with your view. Ofcourse, it's a perception with no clear lines drawn between the visibly black and white. Google, the 'do no evil' company, one which I have a lot of respect and admiration for, had to give into the Chinese governements demands and I don't know about the other Googlietes, but I for one was troubled and felt cheated. But as Orwell shows the Animal Farm unravel into nothing but a cycle, so shall China.
Bypassing more than 23% of the worlds population (and that too with the highest growth) would go against the grain of business acumen. There is and should be passion and ethics involved but we should always know who and why we are fighting. Are the Chinese complaining or are they proudly asserting their stature of the most evolved form of communism.They themselves realise the need for autocracy in their system, at least for the while. In the end, if companies fail to give into a few rules, they would be taking on a behemoth withouth too substantial a reasonand hurt no one but themselves.Who cares if Google fights against China. You and I might today, but after 3? It would be called being...? Parallels can be drawn from just about everywhere in the industry, maybe it's all about where you draw the line and where you give in. However, to reiterate, I don't think this calls for the US companies having doble standards (god knows how much I love Georgy, but taking it out on the US firms would be unfair:))
Cheers!
I appreciate your viewpoint Shamsher. But my contention is that these corporate behemoths preach one thing in their mission statements and do another when it comes to making big bucks. If you just click on the links below, the contradiction will be evident to you.
Google: http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
MS: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/mission/
Yahoo: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/values/
Again just because a nation is powerful and strong does not mean that everyone has to dance to its whims and fancies. If that is the case, then do remember that there were vested commercial interests that made companies continue doing business with Hitler's Germany. And Germany during 1930s was extremely powerful and hardly any German complained then. The comparison may be odious, but China, despite its facade of economic sparkle, is predominantly an authoritarian regime, which has not come clean on human rights issue. At the same time, the collective political and commercial pressure on S.Africa during 1980s made it change its policy of Aprthied. So, believing in the ideal of "You can make money without doing evil" is one thing and practicing it another.
Do read Human Rights Watch report “Race to the Bottom”--Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/
The trigger to write this report came when I read y'day about Union offices being granted space in Wal-Mart China. Now, this same company denies the basic right of peaceful negotiation & collective bargaining power to its employees in other countries. So, what is so special about China? Think objectively and deeply on these issues and I'm sure you'll see the irony as well as the hypocrisy on part of the US companies. That was my sole objective in writing this post; and not to pontificate.
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