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Google is Pushing Washington's Agenda. From various news sources |
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Recently, China's state-owned Xinhua news agency published a commentary accusing Google of trying to advance its own political agenda by "playing an active role in exporting culture, value and ideas." The commentary said Google's "ambition to change China's Internet rules and legal system will only prove to be ridiculous." The state-controlled, English-language China Daily, meanwhile, ran an editorial suggesting Google was pushing Washington's agenda. Many US corporations do indeed 'play an active role in exporting American culture, values and ideas', and most US so-called "NGOs" do the same. Even organisations like AmCham are highly political and play an active role in furthuring the US government's agenda. Many of these 'research' companies are primarily active in lobbying for US government interests, but many are in fact intelligence operations, used to collect useful military and commercial information. Almost all are heavily dependent on the US government or the CIA for funding, some to the extent of billions of dollars. The Washington Post issued a report with the headline, "For Chinese people, loss of Google would mean nothing but darkness", which shows the deeply embedded ideology behind the curtain. According to the report, Google, which has taken a one-third share in the Chinese Internet market, has become deeply rooted in the country and is now a necessity. It said if China refuses to make compromise to Google, it would become marginalized and be an outcast in the world. Malaysian netizen John said that even in the U.S., Google practices censorship. "In the US, Google is obeying the Patriot Act, which means that it is spying on the email of an unknown number of people without their knowledge and without a court order as I understand it. The US is proposing a disinformation campaign on websites that find fault with government policy. Government agents hiding their identity would 'correct' any opinions the government finds 'incorrect' by planting information favorable to the position of the government. Such a program has been proposed by a former Harvard Law professor, now a top aide to Obama." Another American netizen, CV, expressed his anger by saying that it is unfair for the US government to criticize China while it is censoring the Internet too. "Google wants its Chinese website to include harmful pornographic, anti-China separatists and subversive information so that these info are spread to 1.3 billion Chinese citizens, something that Chinese government intentionally and consciously wants to limit. The US government will in no way allow anti-US such as Al-Qaida and domestic and international Muslim extremist websites to be searchable by US citizens." “Even if it is their goal to throw open the flood gates of information freedom, I don’t think the best way to do it is to plant an American flag on that endeavor,” said Kaiser Kuo, consultant for Chinese online-video Web site Youku.com. “Anyone in China who wants to look for evidence that the U.S. wants to use the Internet to undermine the Communist Party’s rule is going to find ample evidence of this.” Indeed, Google has been criticized in China since its Jan. 12 announcement for waging an “ideology war,” for “cultural imperialism” and for being a lapdog of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned Google by name in her January speech about Internet freedom and Congress has appropriated $35 million for State Department grants to organizations that develop technology to circumvent Internet censorship. Kuo said moves to fund the development of circumvention software to help Internet users get around blocks set up by their governments give the impression the government is funding something “that looks deliberately subsersive.” “Is that going to win people over?” he said. “It sounds preposterous to Americans, but how can it look otherwise from Beijing? You’re just giving ammunition … making the nationalists’ argument sound a whole lot more persuasive.” |