One of the more overworked phrases in the modern geopolitical lexicon is “the clash of civilisations”. It has been widely used to inflate the significance of a conflict between a small band of Islamist nutcases and the governments of the West. Sometimes, however, the phrase is truly apt — as with the clash that broke out last week between America’s most innovative company and the world’s last significant communist dictatorship.
Google, which four years ago launched, with some misgivings, a censored version of its search engine on the Chinese mainland, has declared that unless the government allows it to offer its product uncensored, it will close its Chinese operations. Since the members of the Chinese politburo are as likely to apply for auditions on The X Factor as agree to such a condition, it is clear Google has spectacularly aborted its local assault on the Chinese internet search market.
A company whose motto is “Don’t be evil” will not be dismayed that many commentators have described its action as a stand for human rights against an oppressive regime. In its statement last week Google said that it had “detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China ... we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists”.
Given the remarkably undiplomatic tone of Google’s statement, it is intriguing that the Chinese authorities have remained almost mute in response. There are a number of reasons for this. First, Google moved suddenly and without warning; it had not discussed its intentions with any of its Chinese employees, still less with the authorities in Beijing. So the regime is shocked.
Second, since the Chinese government refuses to admit it censors what its public reads, it is difficult for the authorities to construct a meaningful statement of rebuttal. The best they could come up with in the People’s Daily was: “Our country is at a crucial stage of reform and development and this is a period of marked social conflicts. Properly guiding internet opinion is a major measure for protecting internet information security.”
Here, in different definitions of the word “security”, is revealed the chasm between these two civilisations. For Google, it means that its customers’ emails are secure from the prying eyes of a secret police; for the Chinese authorities, security means knowing what the citizenry is thinking and punishing those whose thoughts are deemed subversive.
Here, too, we see how Google’s purely commercial interests and its claims to represent the forces of free expression are inextricably intertwined. While Google insisted that its decision was not based on business considerations — Google.cn made bumper profits in its most recent trading period — a company that wants to be trusted with everyone’s personal details cannot possibly afford to be seen to have any association with hackers, even if those hackers have a permanent seat on the United Nations security council. In fact the human rights of a few Chinese dissidents with Gmail accounts are a tiny fragment of the story; as Google itself pointed out, it is by no means the only US high-technology company that has recently found its systems being hacked into by the Chinese. Britain is a target, too — in 2007 MI5 warned a number of our leading companies that they were under concerted cyber-attack from China.
This is nothing to do with persecuting dissidents and everything to do with Beijing’s desire to catch up and overtake the West as quickly and cheaply as possible. As James Lewis of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies pointed out: “This is a big espionage programme aimed at getting information — the high-tech information to jump-start China’s economy. This is what China’s leadership is after.”
It’s true that in each individual case neither Lewis nor indeed Google will know whether it is the Chinese government or just a Chinese company engaging in commercial espionage. The point, however, is that in such a highly politicised system as China’s this is a distinction not worth making.
To be fair to the Chinese Communist party, at least it is now pursuing its constant objective without slaughtering or even disadvantaging its citizens. Fifty years ago the communists under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung promulgated the “great leap forward”, during which millions of farmers were made to leave their land and work in steel mills to match the industrialisation of the West. The result was the biggest famine in recorded history: an estimated 36m Chinese starved to death.
Deng Xiaoping’s “four modernisations”, launched in 1978, were an infinitely more rational approach to the same challenge, since they acknowledged the need for China to use international trade to build a modern economy — although as one battle-hardened Sinologist put it to me: “They are now playing grandmother’s footsteps with us, but they will still unsheathe their sword when they get close enough to use it.”
Mao’s obsessive drive to modernise China at breakneck pace and the much less destructive methods used by his successors can be easily understood in the context of this great country’s history. Its own vivid appreciation of its greatness led to the monumental complacency of the Qing dynasty, whose superiority complex (a notable Chinese national trait) allowed it to be humiliated by the much more entrepreneurial British empire.
This is one reason why the Chinese leaders are so unabashed when western businesses accuse them of intellectual copyright theft and even present them with the evidence. At bottom they feel that we stole their place in the sun and whatever chicanery they use to restore their position — as it was before the industrial revolution left them in our wake — is nothing whatever to be ashamed of.
More than national pride is at stake for the ruling elite, however. Like any dictatorship, it is much more terrified of its own people than of other nations.
You can see this in the People’s Daily’s reference to “marked social conflicts”. As popular dissatisfaction cannot be exorcised by the ballot box, there is always the possibility of mass violence. It has already been seen in the past year from the Tibetans and the Uighurs, but these recent bloody outbursts among ethnic minorities are mere nothings compared with what might happen if the Han Chinese themselves were to rebel against their political rulers.
In his book Experiences of China, Sir Percy Cradock, who spent 30 years negotiating with the Chinese — not least as Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser from 1984 to 1992 — ended with the warning that the grip of the Chinese Communist party would not be ended in a “benign” way: there would be “a sharp break, a revolutionary incident and a visible, probably physical, clash between two ideologies. This ... is likely to be bloody”.
Cradock published his mesmerising memoirs in 1994; he would probably not have imagined an entity such as Google, which did not even exist until 1998. Yet Google’s youthfully brash, apparently naive appeal to the interests of the Chinese people over the heads of its somewhat stunned leaders perhaps meets Cradock’s definition of “a revolutionary incident ... a clash between two ideologies”.
When civilisations clash there is generally only one winner. History, rather than today’s commentators, will record the ultimate outcome of this ideological conflict between free expression and thought control. My money is not on the Chinese Communist party, despite all its genius for repression.
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk
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Dominic Lawson writes a weekly column for the Sunday Times and also contributes book reviews and interviews. He won many awards as a newspaper and magazine editor and in his spare time wrote an acclaimed book about Grandmaster chess, The Inner Game.
The Editor of the TLS writes on books, people and politics
Mary Beard of Cambridge and the TLS on culture ancient and modern
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