Google, China and Cold Blood

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"Don't be evil, unless you have to" seems a more accurate and realistic motto. It would be, if uphold, already an extraordinary ideal, morally speaking. Too much evil is gratuitous, predictable and evitable, the result of careless attitude or absentmindedness. Stupidity, in a word, runs devil's business most of the times.

Google is doing in China what companies do best: launching its business; negotiating with the political and social environment in order to survive first and then flourish; making (or at least laying down the conditions in order to make) profits. All this is fine. There is no moral scandal in accepting restrictions on what users may have access to. Censored information is better than no information at all. And a limited Google now is a Trojan horse tomorrow. The Chinese government probably knows that all too well. They certainly need no lesson on wisdom and long-term planning. So why are they opening the gates to such a loaded gift? The best way to look at the future effects of Google on the e-life of Chinese users is in terms of gradual adaptation. It is like when you buy a goldfish. Because fish have cold blood, you do not drop it immediately in the freezing pond, for it would die of hypothermia. You keep it in its transparent plastic bag with its lukewarm water, and put the bag with the fish in the pond. The water inside slowly cools down, the fish gradually adapts to it and the following day you can let it free. Sometime things need to be done gradually, not in hotness, but in cold blood.

From The Economist (Apr 27th 2006, Special report on china and the internet):
"In the past three years, China has seen far more extensive use of the internet and the rapid development of groups that share views online that are by no means always the same as the party's. The numbers of internet-connected computers have more than doubled since the end of 2002, to 45.6m, and internet-users have risen by 75%, to 111m. China now has more internet-users than any country but America, and over half of them have broadband (up from 6.6% at the end of 2002). Users of instant computer-to-computer messaging systems have more than doubled, to 87m. Blogs--online personal diaries, scarcely heard of three years ago--now number more than 30m. And search engines receive over 360m requests a
day.


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