The clash between China and Google is the first shot in what could be a long war. Why should this be the case when, as Fareed Zakaria notes, the U.S. and China “have powerful reasons to cooperate with one another”?
Those reasons, however powerful, might not be enough. The trouble is that what Americans think of as basic liberty, something that’s as necessary to the good life as the air we breathe, China regards as imperialism.
Consider a few comments from China. The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist party’s newspaper, declares that “in the eyes of American politicians, only when information is controlled by the U.S. does it count as free information.” In addition, the newspaper says, “It was America that initiated Internet warfare, using YouTube videos and Twitter micro-blog misinformation to split, incite, and sow discord between the conservative and reform factions . . . to bring about large-scale bloodshed in Iran.” Meanwhile, the Global Times, a state-run newspaper in China, declares that “the U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy. . . . China’s real stake in the ‘free flow of information’ is evident in its refusal to be victimized by information imperialism.” China used the same term, “information imperialism,” to denounce Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for China to open up the Internet.
How is it an attack merely to support the free flow of information? One scholar suggests that China’s “assumption that Google, as a Chinese editorial put it, is a ‘political pawn’ of the U.S. government, is a clear case of projection.”
There might be more to it. The real conflict is that China and the U.S. have opposing understandings of what it means to be a nation. What Americans regard as a value-neutral, universal idea — namely, that citizens have a right to the free and open flow of information — China regards as a particular idea, built upon a peculiarly American value. Things that Americans regard as none of the state’s business, such as what is in the newspapers and how we worship (or don’t worship) God, China regards as the people’s, and hence the government’s, business. Things that Americans think have nothing to do with foreign policy, China regards as fundamental state interests.
In America, we take “civil society” — a sphere of activity where free and equal citizens may do and say what they please — for granted. Since that is our experience, we tend to think that it’s simply how the world is supposed to be. Yet individual liberty, personal privacy, and the rights to assemble, to lobby, and to exchange thoughts and beliefs are particular ideas, even if they are universal in scope. To provide just one example: In China, there are five officially recognized religions. Members of other religious groups are not free to practice openly.
China understands America very differently than we do. To them, the U.S. private sector and the U.S. government comprise one all-encompassing nation. Hence the “campaign for the uncensored free flow of information” is a “U.S. campaign,” and they see Google as a tool of the U.S. government. To them, the U.S., through Google, is engaged in “Internet warfare.” To allow information to flow freely, without monitoring by the government, is to knuckle under to Western imperialism. In short, China does not acknowledge the distinction between state and society that is fundamental in America.
To the Chinese, YouTube and Twitter — inventions of private U.S. citizens, run in the private sector, and used mostly by private citizens — are lumped together with actions of the U.S. government. Last spring, Iranian dissidents used Twitter to coordinate their opposition to the Iranian government. To China, that means that the U.S. was helping the Iranian opposition. To the degree that it was America’s freedom that made the creation of YouTube and Twitter possible, both in concept and in execution, they have a point.
We face, in short, a clash of regimes. Values and institutions that are fundamental in and essential to the United States, and that make the U.S. what it is, are incompatible with values and institutions that are fundamental in and essential to China, and that make it what it is.
Many American believe and hope that the world is moving toward the “end of history” — a world in which all societies are free. Unfree states, the norm throughout history, are on the way out. China is an anachronism. That’s probably why, as a Google search reveals, so many pundits think that China’s foreign policy is “irresponsible.” China, in this view, has yet to take the responsibilities that come with being a major power.
China, however, sees it differently. To them, the U.S. is the anomaly. Throughout history, most nations have regulated religion and communications. Hence, they conclude, the U.S. is a utopian experiment that is doomed to fail. The recent financial crisis, they think, is more evidence for their position. That’s why they, in turn, often call us “irresponsible.”
In the U.S., we realize that we have had such crises roughly every 20 years since 1819. They don’t show the failure of the system; they are the system. And that’s precisely what bothers national governments that love stability and order rather than liberty and improvement.
As China becomes an ever more important player in world affairs, the clash between the liberal regimes of the West and China will continue. The conflict will not end until either the U.S. or China changes fundamentally. Ultimately, the very existence of the Chinese regime, as it is currently constituted and as it understands itself, is irreconcilable with the idea of a truly private sector, one with freedoms of expression and religion. As the regime sees it, China cannot accept the free flow of ideas, information, and goods and still be China.
– Richard Samuelson is the 2009–2010 Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, and an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, San Bernardino.